DARKMATTERS - The Mind Of Matt

Matt vs Living Nightmare (review)

2026-10-16T10:14:56.654+01:00

Matt vs Living Nightmare

Reviewed by Matt Adcock (@cleric20) at The Market Theatre, Hitchin

“The dead are never completely absent…”

Which is excellent news for those who appreciate gothic entertainment, but less reassuring for anyone hoping their royal skeletons might stay safely in the cupboard. I went to the opening night of Living Nightmare which is a deliciously dark revenge-em-up that puts Katherine Lea and Nicola Hurst within plotting distance of each other and unleashes untold psychological nastiness.

'a palpable lack of trust'

Be warned, this is rum stuff. Our rival queens bring enough ambition and dangerous intent to make Lady Macbeth consider joining a mediation service, but it’s the excellently human hunger beneath the royal entitlement that gives this confrontation its bite.

Lea and Hurst are terrific together, making duplicity dangerously watchable as their battle shifts between simmering threat and heightened stakes in the confines a dark, very possibly haunted underground chamber.

The Market Theatre’s intimate confines, really work to immerse in this nasty piece which will please those who want something to ratchet up psychological tense to the point where sanity itself is questioned.

'who will win the battle of wits?"

The stage work is excellent, and it’s aided by some great lighting and soundscape too. One poor chap along from me in the front row jumped and yelped at one point and the whole audience was awash with communal horror as the levels of darkness keep escalating to the shocking climax.

There’s something particularly satisfying about finding this much gothic goodness on your doorstep rather than having to drag yourself into London for it. Living Nightmare gives two compelling performers the chance to get royally under your skin, and they seize it with wicked relish. Go and indulge your darker appetites, preferably with somebody whose hand you’re allowed to squeeze…

Darkmatters: ö ö ö ö ö

(5 deliciously tarnished crowns out of 5)

Book tickets here

'brilliantly evil'

I got the change to ask the evil queens some q's

I asked them ‘where did you find inspiration for your characters?’

Katherine looked to Queen Caroline and Bloody Mary. Nicola drew on a lifelong love of period drama, Shakespeare’s women, exploring what drives her character as a human being navigating a man’s world.

What’s your favourite scary story, film, book or play?

Katherine’s tastes lean towards the gothic, particularly Jane Eyre and The Yellow Wallpaper. Nicola admits to being a bit of a wimp when it comes to horror, but picks The Woman in Black.

Do you believe in ghosts, or have you experienced anything paranormal?

Katherine’s mum is convinced she has seen a ghost, while Katherine points to the palpable atmosphere certain spaces can hold. Nicola is undecided, but leaves room for things we cannot explain.

How much fun is it to keep ramping up the horror for the audience?

For Katherine, playing the duplicity is a particular pleasure. Nicola describes the challenge of starting with such high stakes and then finding the peaks and troughs, rather than simply pushing harder throughout. Her description of their onstage duel? A “gothic tennis match” which, frankly, deserves its own category at Wimbledon if you ask me!!

Photo credit @glyndoggett

>>> Imagine a cyberpunk world where the Earth is becoming hell? One man with powers and his robot sidekick might be our only hope... This is high tech / low life meeting the forces of hell!?

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Matt vs The Howling Franchise reviews

2026-10-05T17:27:07.030+01:00

THE HOWLING FRANCHISE: Screaming at the hairy moon…

Matt Adcock (@Cleric20) tackles the beast of very questionable quality inside

There are probably film franchises which spend decades carefully curating their mythology, bringing characters in ways that work, dropping fan-service breadcrumbs and easter eggs as though somebody, somewhere, knows what’s Canon.

Then there is The Howling, a series which begins in 1981 as a smart, nasty, genuinely rather brilliant Joe Dante satire about television, trauma and the monsters living amongst us. The effects and general vibe making it a killer double bill with An American Werewolf in London.

From then on though this lycanthrope franchise chews through its own restraints and bounds off to hang out with Transylvanian sex-witches, Australian marsupials, bargain-bin gothic murder mysteries, vampire-versus-werewolf carnival shenanigans and, eventually, the sort of country-and-western bar where the availability of line dancing seems to take precedence over whether anybody has remembered to put an actual werewolf in the movie.

Ok… It’s a full moon, the moors are calling… Let’s go:

THE HOWLING (1981)

Joe Dante's original remains a delicious early-'80s horror feeling of talented people being allowed to make something grim, clever and properly weird without anybody in a franchise strategy meeting demanding to know which character might support a streaming spin-off. Dee Wallace is great as Karen White, a television news reporter traumatised after helping police corner serial killer Eddie Quist, who is subsequently sent off to a supposedly therapeutic retreat called The Colony.

What still gives The Howling its teeth isn't simply the monsters but the thoroughly cynical view of the supposedly civilised humans standing around them. Dante and screenwriter John Sayles have great fun with television culture, self-help gurus, sexual repression and people's endless ability to turn horror into content. Rob Bottin's transformations still possess that magnificently tactile wrongness which CGI has spent decades trying unsuccessfully to replace. Faces swell, jaws stretch and human anatomy is remixed live on screen.

Darkmatters: ö ö ö ö ö

5 traumatised TV anchors unexpectedly turning into giant hairy truth bombs out of 5. This is the full-strength stuff: funny, nasty, technically glorious and still considerably cleverer than rest of the ‘franchise’!?

HOWLING II: YOUR SISTER IS A WEREWOLF (1985)

If Dante's original is an urbane beast in a suit, Howling II is the same animal three nights into an Eastern European stag weekend, wearing leather trousers it doesn't remember buying and attempting to explain occult genealogy to Christopher Lee while Sybil Danning presides over a werewolf orgy in the next crypt.

To say there is a tonal lurch between the first two films that genuinely takes some believing would be fair. The previous film's haunted final moments launch a globe-trotting supernatural adventure involving ancient wolf cults, Stirba the immortal werewolf queen, titanium weaponry, punk gigs, ritualistic sex and the sight of Christopher Lee maintaining magnificent actorly dignity while surrounded by material which would have made lesser men simply stare into the middle distance.

The film's greatest achievement is perhaps that it never once seems embarrassed by itself. Philippe Mora directs with the energy of somebody who has been told there are no consequences, while the soundtrack pounds away, Reb Brown shouts at things and Lee explains adding unwarranted credibility. Then come those end credits, which repeatedly replay Danning ripping off her top in a manner so enthusiastic that the film itself seems to have stolen the remote control and become trapped in a rewind loop.

Darkmatters: ö ö ö½

3½ Christopher Lees grimly refusing to admit he is trapped in an erotic werewolf fever dream out of 5.

HOWLING III: THE MARSUPIALS (1987)

Philippe Mora apparently finished Howling II, surveyed the smoking wreckage and thought the problem was that nobody had yet investigated the evolutionary possibilities of Australian werewolves with pouches, so The Marsupials relocates everything Down Under and proceeds to create a wildlife documentary.

Our focal wolf is Jerboa, a young woman escaping an isolated community who winds up involved with a filmmaker while scientists, military types and assorted interested parties slowly discover that Australia contains an entire strain of alternative lycanthropic life. Mora pushes the comedy harder here and the result is much broader than either of the previous films.

Feels like a petting zoo surrounded by scenes which resemble Mad Max having a nervous breakdown.

Darkmatters: ö ö ö

3 baffled Australian wildlife experts out of 5. Deeply daft, strangely charming and precisely the kind of movie that rewards watching with tequila.

HOWLING IV: THE ORIGINAL NIGHTMARE (1988)

AGary Brandner's original novel had been heavily reworked for Joe Dante's film, so Howling IV returns to something closer to the source material, which means we are now watching the fourth film in a franchise that is also, in practical terms, another version of film number one. Nobody appears terribly troubled by this, least of all the movie, which simply introduces writer Marie Adams, sends her to the suspiciously named town.

This is much slower and cheaper than Dante's film, with fewer jokes and considerably less satirical bite, but there is a decent clammy atmosphere to Drago. The budget occasionally shows through the wallpaper, but when the transformations arrive they have a wonderfully gloopy practical nastiness, including one especially memorable sequence where a human body seems less to transform than to melt into biological soup before hairily rebuilding itself.

Darkmatters: ö ½

1½ quietly liquefying authors out of 5. Not remotely essential, but respectably eerie and packing enough goo to keep the practical-effects faithful awake.

HOWLING V: THE REBIRTH (1989)

Then, The Howling decides it wants to become Cluedo. A group of assorted strangers are invited to an ancient Hungarian castle which has only recently reopened after centuries of grim history, heavy snow cuts them off from the outside world and people begin dying one by one while everybody attempts to work out which guest is secretly the werewolf. It's such a simple shift in approach that I'm surprised more of the sequels didn't try it: instead of worrying about escalating the monster action it just has the characters bounce between paranoia and fairly understandable terror as the bodies start accumulating. There is a pleasantly Agatha-Christie-meets-video-shop quality to proceedings, and although the film hardly possesses the resources of peak Hammer, it understands that half the pleasure of this sort of thing is watching a bunch of mutually suspicious people realise that one of them is considerably furrier than advertised.

The Rebirth is probably the most straightforwardly enjoyable sequel after the original because it has a clear gimmick, sticks with it and doesn't introduce a single marsupial reproductive organ.

Darkmatters: ö ½

1½ castle guests shedding on the furniture out of 5. An underseen little gothic-em-up bitten by insanity.

HOWLING VI: THE FREAKS (1991)

By film six the series has arrived at the travelling carnival, which is where every long-running horror franchise eventually goes when it has exhausted laboratories, castles and isolated communities. The Freaks introduces Ian, a drifter burdened with the usual full-moon employment difficulties, who falls into the clutches of R.B. Harker, the sinister owner of a carnival who spots Ian's lycanthropic condition and rather cruelly decides it would make a splendid attraction. This is already promising territory, but then the film reveals that Harker is a vampire and suddenly we're watching werewolf versus bloodsucker years before Underworld!?

Bruce Payne enjoys himself enormously as Harker without tipping completely into pantomime. There are echoes of Freaks, Universal monster movies and carnival gothic throughout, although naturally filtered through the budget and aesthetic expectations of early-'90s straight-to-video horror.

Darkmatters: ö ö

2 carnies in need of flea treatment out of 5. Probably the late series' sleeper entry, with more atmosphere and empathy than anybody had reasonable grounds to expect.

HOWLING: NEW MOON RISING (1995)

And then we reach the country (low)bar.

There are bad sequels, there are cheap sequels and there are films whose very existence feels like somebody discovered a loophole in the legal definition of cinema; New Moon Rising exists somewhere in that third category. A mysterious drifter arrives in a Californian town, locals talk, drink, play music, dance and occasionally remember that they are nominally participating in the seventh entry of a werewolf franchise. The quantity of line dancing becomes so substantial that you begin to suspect the lycanthropy is merely a subplot in a documentary about regional nightlife which has been aggressively re-edited by someone holding the franchise rights.

The really extraordinary bit is the film's determination to tie together Howling IV, V and VI through reused footage and retroactive exposition. Scenes from earlier instalments appear, characters are discussed, connections are painstakingly explained and the movie behaves as though audiences worldwide have spent sleepless years demanding clarity on the precise canonical relationship between The Original Nightmare and The Freaks. It is continuity repair at the level of somebody attempting to fix a collapsing conservatory with Blu Tack while a country band plays ten feet away.

I found myself becoming weirdly fascinated by it. Not entertained exactly, because words have meanings, but fascinated in the way of seeing someone who obviously doesn’t like Werewolves make Howling film!?

Darkmatters: ½

½ increasingly alarmed line-dancing extras out of 5. An extraordinary object which should probably be preserved in a vault so future civilisations can understand what happened to direct-to-video horror in the mid-'90s.

THE HOWLING: REBORN (2011)

Sixteen years later the beast rises again and immediately discovers that Twilight has happened. This time the franchise is rebooted around teenager Will Kidman, whose imminent graduation becomes complicated by the discovery that he is developing lycanthropic tendencies, while the girl he fancies, Eliana, gets pulled into a supernatural conflict involving a distinctly more youthful breed of werewolf. The tone is glossy, earnest and extremely aware that supernatural romance has become a thing.

There is no Joe Dante media satire, no Christopher Lee occult road trip, no Australian evolutionary anthropology, no gothic castle mystery and, thankfully, absolutely no line dancing. Instead we get a competent teen horror in which puberty and lycanthropy are treated as adjoining inconveniences, complete with school corridors, romance, angst and young people discovering that adulthood involves considerably more body hair than anyone warned them about.

Darkmatters: ö ½

1½ hormonally overwhelmed teen wolves out of 5. Slicker than most of its ancestors, considerably less interesting than the lunatic ones and crying out for Christopher Lee to appear halfway through and explain that everything is actually the work of Stirba.

SO WHICH HOWLING ACTUALLY HOWLS and which are just HOWLERS?

Watching the whole series back-to-back is a wonderfully unhealthy reminder of how franchises used to mutate before cinematic universes became corporate engineering projects. Nobody had a twelve-year roadmap for The Howling; somebody simply kept finding enough money to make another one and, crucially, often seemed determined not to make the same movie twice. The results range from genuinely excellent to barely classifiable, but even the disasters have personality, even if they make you want to punch yourself in the face to stay focused, which is more than can be said for plenty of far more expensive franchise entries currently algorithm-ing their way onto streaming services.

Werewolf mythology has always been about the respectable exterior giving way to something messier, nastier and much less socially acceptable underneath, and few horror franchises have demonstrated that principle quite so literally in their own production history. The Howling begins as prestige cult horror and gradually transforms, movie by movie, into something nobody involved at the start could possibly have anticipated; the mostly embarrassing results speak for themselves...

Darkmatters says: come for Rob Bottin's still-extraordinary flesh-ripping transformation effects, stay for Sybil Danning's immortal wolf queen, marsupial birth horror, Hungarian castle paranoia, vampire carnies and the only horror sequel I can immediately recall where extensive line dancing becomes a legitimate endurance test.

Inconsistent… Spectacularly. Mostly terrible? Beyond argument. But boring franchises are ten-a-penny, whereas this one is certainly packed with oddities, and makes Hellraiser’s even longer running efforts look classy :)

Read my take on the 10 Hellraiser films here.

>>> Imagine a cyberpunk world where the Earth is becoming hell? One man with powers and his robot sidekick might be our only hope... This is high tech / low life meeting the forces of hell!?

Click banner below to hear a FREE 5 mins sample of my audiobook which is becoming a graphic novel too)...

The Gentlemen series one and two review...

2026-09-28T16:02:54.210+01:00

THE GENTLEMEN: DRUGS, DUKES AND GOOD TAILORING

Matt Adcock looks at Guy Ritchie's criminal aristocracy…

There are some filmmakers like Guy Ritchie, whose particular blend of sharp suits, sharper dialogue, criminal scheming and sudden bursts of ultraviolence just does it for me. I loved his The Gentlemen movie, a hugely enjoyable gangster-em-up which saw Matthew McConaughey's splendidly named Mickey Pearson presiding over a marijuana empire hidden underneath Britain's landed estates, so when Netflix announced that Ritchie was going to revisit that same criminal ecosystem as a TV series, I was excited, but also I really didn’t want him to fuck it up!!

So The Gentlemen series isn't really a sequel to the film at all but an expansion of its central idea, ditching Mickey Pearson and introducing an entirely new family headed up by Eddie Horniman (Theo 'Divergent' James), a soldier who unexpectedly inherits his father's title, Halstead Manor.

What initially looks like a nice fish-out-of-water crime comedy soon becomes something considerably more interesting because Eddie, unlike most decent people who accidentally discover a drug empire under their house, turns out to be worryingly good at running one.

I've seriously enjoyed this show, so here is my Darkmatters episode-by-episode Gentlemen-em-up, with mild-to-quite-severe spoilers depending on your tolerance for knowing when somebody might end up dead, buried, eaten or all three...

SEASON ONE – WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE

Episode 1: REFINED AGGRESSION

Eddie comes home after his father's death expecting to deal with the usual inheritance issues but instead gets a dukedom, Halstead Manor, a basket case of a brother and the small matter of an enormous cannabis farm. Turns out primogeniture is considerably more exciting when the family legacy comes with industrial hydroponics and armed criminals... Welcome home Your Grace :)

Episode 2: TACKLE TOMMY WOO WOO

The wonderfully psychotic Gospel and his crew add another layer of threat and by now one important rule of The Gentlemen has become clear: every problem can be solved, but the solution will almost certainly create three significantly worse ones.

Episode 3: WHERE'S MY WEED AT?

Jimmy (Michael Vu) manages to misplace enough product to keep several counties happily sedated, sending Eddie and Susie chasing the missing weed and eventually into a Fast n Furious caper involving a truly radioactive-looking Lamborghini.

Episode 4: AN UNSYMPATHETIC GENTLEMAN

Blackmail, aristocratic depravity, Nazi memorabilia and Hitler's preserved testicle all collide in an episode which finally gives Britain the costume drama it deserves. Freddie Fox turns up as the wonderfully vile Lord Bassington and the whole thing goes full deranged-posho-em-up…

Episode 5: I'VE HUNDREDS OF COUSINS

Eddie's continuing attempts to stabilise the Glass operation introduce another criminal ecosystem, this time a traveller family whose strength very much lies in numbers. Ritchie has always been great at creating competing underworld tribes!

Episode 6: ALL EVENTUALITIES

Fifteen million quid needs laundering, Jack Glass needs protecting and Freddy decides that what the world really needs is 'crack weed', because apparently ordinary cannabis just wasn't creating sufficient levels of mayhem.

Episode 7: NOT WITHOUT DANGER

Susie goes into full revenge mode after events involving Jack while Eddie starts considering whether the best way out of one criminal empire might be selling it to an even more dangerous criminal empire… Giancarlo Esposito's beautifully controlled Stanley Johnston is absolutely superb here, radiating the sort of immaculate menace which suggests that accepting one of his dinner invitations probably counts as signing a legal waiver.

Episode 8: THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO BOBBY GLASS

Bobby Glass announces his intention to retire and essentially turns the criminal empire into The Apprentice: Organised Crime Edition, only with a considerably harsher firing process.

DARKMATTERS SEASON ONE VERDICT

Season One occasionally meanders while positioning all the pieces but once Eddie, Susie and the Glass empire are properly locked together it becomes massively addictive stuff!!

Out of a potential 5 you have to go with a Darkmatters:

ö ö ö ö ½ (4.5 – Extremely classy crime-em-up action with a nasty streak hiding under the tweed.)

Awesomeness öööö½ – Gunplay, gangsters and stately home weed farms, what's not to like?
Laughs öööö – Freddy alone adds at least two stars.
Horror ööö – Some pleasingly nasty moments when the criminal world draws weapons.
Spiritual Enlightenment öö – Thou shalt probably not build a narcotics empire beneath thy ancestral home.

The MVP has to be Susie Glass, because Kaya Scodelario somehow makes organised crime administration look both incredibly stylish and utterly exhausting.

Then there's Freddy, a genuine walking public-safety incident… Daniel Ings pulls off the impressive trick of making him appalling, hilarious and somehow still weirdly lovable.

Vinnie Jones' Geoff is the other secret weapon. There's real melancholy behind the hard-man exterior and Jones gives him far more depth than expected, although there is never any doubt whatsoever that Geoff could dispose of a body, mend a fence and be back to feed the pheasants before lunch.

And the season's WTF crown? It simply has to be Hitler's testicle. There are times when television stops being mere entertainment and becomes culture.

SEASON TWO – THE DUKE OF FUCK-AROUND-AND-FIND-OUT

The empire has expanded, the ambition levels have gone stratospheric and Eddie wants influence, territory, status and increasingly the whole bloody board, which means the show can stop asking whether he'll escape the gangster lifestyle and start examining the much juicier possibility that the respectable Duke and the ruthless criminal might actually be the same person wearing different jackets.

Episode 1: THE ROAD TO KINGDOM

Season Two wastes no time announcing its bigger ambitions as Eddie starts chasing political status, the Italians arrive, valuable art becomes problematic and a tiger delivers perhaps the most decisive staff appraisal of the year. Mafia politics, Botticelli, aristocratic scheming and large carnivorous mammals all appear in the opening salvo.

Episode 2: THERE'S A RAT IN THE KITCHEN

Eddie heads to Milan and discovers that international business networking apparently works much like LinkedIn except there are significantly more corpses. The big change is how proactive he has become because Season One Eddie generally reacted to danger whereas this upgraded version plans, manipulates and keeps things from Susie, which is obviously going to be completely fine and definitely won't come back to bite anybody later...

Episode 3: DO YOU REJECT SATAN?

Eddie becomes a godfather, starts dealing with some very amusing unrest among the weed-farm workforce. Does Eddie reject Satan? Not so much as appear keen to explore whether there might be mutually advantageous business opportunities.

Episode 4: THE BIGGER PICTURE

Cannabis legislation, Westminster connections, bishops and a missing falcon make for one of the season's best collisions of old establishment and new crime, as Eddie discovers that lobbying Parliament doesn't feel entirely unlike organised crime

Episode 5: A SUBURBAN A-ROAD ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF BASINGSTOKE

Possibly one of the greatest episode titles ever committed to television sees Eddie beaten, buried alive and subjected to what might generously be described as Bobby Glass' immersive executive mentoring programme. Visit Hampshire - bring a shovel.

Episode 6: THE BELLS OF SAN DOMENICO

A gorgeous Italian wedding full of sunshine, gangsters, family, fabulous clothes and let’s not forget some blood. It’s glorious but we’re just waiting for the inevitable bad thing... and when it comes, it properly hurts.

Episode 7: THIS MAD CIRCUS

Halstead Manor effectively becomes Home Alone as armed men descend on the estate and make the spectacularly poor decision to invade somewhere defended by Vinnie Jones. Geoff gets to demonstrate why he’s the baddest ass character in the show.

Episode 8: BRING ME THE HEAD

By the finale Eddie it’s all betrayals, family revelations and the battery-to-bollocks interrogation technique… Eddie can survive this criminal world and it’s getting increasingly nasty... Bring on the chainsaws!?

DARKMATTERS SEASON TWO VERDICT

Season Two is where The Gentlemen goes from being a highly entertaining spin-off to something closer to its own proper crime saga. The stakes are bigger and the locations more exotic, sure, but what really makes it work is that the violence now comes with consequences. Eddie's transformation gives all the Ritchie swagger a poisonous dramatic core because ambition costs him something, power starts demanding payment and the smooth Duke increasingly resembles the sort of person Season One Eddie might have regarded as the problem.

Out of a potential 5 you have to go with a Darkmatters:

ö ö ö ö ö (5 – International gangster-em-up brilliance with extra teeth.)

Awesomeness ööööö – Tigers, Italian mobsters, revenge and Vinnie Jones defending the manor.

Laughs öööö – Still gloriously funny even when everything is going horribly wrong.
Horror öööö – The violence lands harder this time because now we actually care.
Spiritual Enlightenment öö½ – Power corrupts, although apparently it also comes with incredible tailoring.

Theo James gets the Season Two MVP for the subtle way Eddie changes without ever feeling like he's suddenly become another character. The really clever bit isn't watching a good man 'turn bad', it's watching him slowly stop pretending that the qualities required to become a successful gangster weren't already baked into him. Confidence, entitlement, discipline, connections, territorial instinct and the ability to make extremely unpleasant decisions.

Susie is still magnificent though, particularly because she grew up knowing exactly what this world was while Eddie actively chooses it, a distinction that could yet become the fault line which blows the whole partnership apart. Kaya Scodelario's ability to suggest murderous disappointment with approximately half an eyebrow remains one of television's most underappreciated superpowers.

Ray Winstone also gets some properly meaty material as Bobby because he doesn't need to shout, posture or even move very much to remind everyone that the Glass empire exists because he built it. His confrontations with Eddie have the flavour of a veteran predator watching a younger one grow teeth and quietly deciding whether that development should be encouraged or terminated.

And then there's Geoff again, because if civilisation does collapse don't waste your time finding some billionaire survival bunker… find Vinnie Jones. Geoff will already have a Land Rover, six months' food, several firearms, a working generator :)

LONG LIVE THE DUKE?

What I really like about The Gentlemen after these sixteen episodes is that the show hasn't simply settled into endlessly remixing Lock, Stock and Snatch, even though all the familiar Ritchie toys are still present and correct. Underneath the stylish criminal fun there is now a genuinely compelling character story because Eddie is so much fun to watch.

Theo James is brilliant because nothing about Eddie's descent feels wildly out of character. If anything, it feels worryingly natural. The qualities were there all along and the criminal empire merely provided somewhere they could flourish.

Maybe that has always been Ritchie's cheekiest point with The Gentlemen anyway, that the distance between aristocracy and organised crime isn't necessarily as great as either group might like us to believe.

Season Three is coming too, which is excellent news, I hope it’s not too long before we can see Eddie, Susie, Bobby, Geoff and the human IED that is Freddy as a fully dysfunctional criminal dynasty… and I am very much up for seeing just how much worse things can get.

>>> Imagine a cyberpunk world where the Earth is becoming hell? One man with powers and his robot sidekick might be our only hope... This is high tech / low life meeting the forces of hell!?

Click banner below to hear a FREE 5 mins sample of my audiobook which is becoming a graphic novel too)...

Hosts in the Shell Cyberpunk Podcast

2026-09-26T16:49:08.353+01:00

HOSTS IN THE SHELL: HOW WE JACKED INTO CYBERPUNK AND ENDED UP TALKING TO RICHARD K. MORGAN

Matt Adcock (@cleric20)

"The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel."

Okay, yes, obligatory Gibson quote deployed. We can begin.

There are moments when you look at the increasingly improbable sequence of events that constitutes your creative life and wonder whether somebody has accidentally loaded the wrong save file.

Interviewing Richard K. Morgan is one of the latest of those moments.

This week, Hosts in the Shell, the cyberpunk podcast I co-host with fellow author and professional dystopian enthusiast Jon Richter, hit Episode 70. And sitting virtually across the table from us was the man who gave the world Takeshi Kovacs.

Richard. K. Freaking. Morgan.

Yes, author of Altered Carbon. Broken Angels. Woken Furies. Black Man/Thirteen. Market Forces. Thin Air. The A Land Fit for Heroes trilogy. And now No Man's Land.

Somehow, he agreed to come onto our slightly feral little cyberpunk podcast.

Even better, he was brilliant.

So brilliant, in fact, that our conversation became a two-parter. Part One is now loose on the network: 40 minutes and 59 seconds of Morgan talking cyberpunk, writing and the worlds he has created, with Jon and me attempting to maintain the pretence that this is all perfectly normal. Buzzsprout's official description calls him a literary hero, “cyberpunk royalty”, a fascinating interviewee and a lovely bloke. Having now interviewed him, I'm not going to argue with any of those.

Listen to Richard K. Morgan on Hosts in the Shell – Part One

But the really weird thing is tracing the fun data trail backwards to see how we got here.

ORIGIN STORY // TWO WRITERS WALK INTO A DYSTOPIA

Jon and I originally collided through the Neo Cyberpunk writing scene.

We were both contributors to Neo Cyberpunk: The Anthology, alongside a suitably dangerous collection of writers including Anna Mocikat, Matthew A. Goodwin, Nik Whittaker, Mark Everglade, James L. Graetz and others. Jon contributed Cleaners; I unleashed Buzz Kill 2.0 (now a comic too)!? Get a copy here: NEO CYBERPUNK

It was one of those gloriously indie projects where you suddenly discover that there are other people out there whose brains have apparently been damaged by the same combination of William Gibson, Blade Runner, black leather, neon, corporate dystopia and an unhealthy suspicion of technology. Yeah we’re still getting the

The actual moment Jon and I properly met came when he invited me onto his Dark Natter podcast in 2021. Dark Natter was Jon and Liam Martin's show dissecting works of dark fiction, and I naturally responded to this opportunity by choosing Richard Stanley's magnificently grubby 1990 cyberpunk killer-robot movie Hardware.

We talked. And talked. And wandered off-topic. And came back. And wandered off again.

In other words, all the essential ingredients of Hosts in the Shell were already present.

We got on so ridiculously well that afterwards Jon floated an idea:

What if we did a podcast together?

Specifically, what if two cyberpunk writers spent unreasonable amounts of time talking about the films, books, games, comics, anime, technology and assorted cultural detritus that had infected our imaginations?

Reader, we jacked in.

That original Dark Natter encounter was eventually smuggled back into the Hosts feed as Episode 52, appropriately subtitled “the first time Jon and Matt met!”

WELCOME TO THE SHELL

Hosts in the Shell launched in February 2022 with Akira, The Matrix Resurrections and, inevitably, Ghost in the Shell.

The basic operating system hasn't changed much since.

Jon and I pick something vaguely cyberpunk. Sometimes actually cyberpunk. Occasionally something whose cyberpunk credentials would not survive even cursory peer review. We watch/read/play it. We hit record. Then we see where the conversation takes us.

The official description remains pleasingly straightforward: we're “writers and cyberpunk fans” discussing the genre's greatest works and interviewing other cyberpunk creators.

The guest list, however, has become increasingly surreal.

We've talked Luther Arkwright with Bryan Talbot, Altered Carbon with T R Napper, Peruvian cyberpunk with Gustaffo Vargas, Silo with Hugh Howey, non-human intelligence and considerably more with Adrian Tchaikovsky, and actually interviewed Bruce Bethke, the bloke who coined the word cyberpunk.

And now Richard K. Morgan.

If William Gibson turns up next week asking whether we've got a spare microphone, I am assuming reality has finally developed a buffer overflow.

THE COMPLETE HOSTS IN THE SHELL ARCHIVE

Because looking back through it is actually quite alarming, here is the whole glorious, malfunctioning machine so far, reconstructed from the show feed. Buzzsprout currently lists 71 releases including the original unnumbered trailer.

TRAILER – Hosts In The Shell trailer!

S1/

E1 – Akira
E2 – The Matrix Resurrections
E3 – Ghost In The Shell
E4 – Johnny Mnemonic
E5 – Cyberpunk indie books
E6 – Total Recall
E7 – Cyberpunk philosophy
E8 – Snow Crash
E9 – Robocop
E10 – The underclass in cyberpunk
E11 – Upgrade
E12 – Luther Arkwright with creator Bryan Talbot
E13 – Batman Beyond and cyberpunk/superhero crossovers
E14 – Blade Runner
E15 – Escape From New York
E16 – Avalon: bonus episode mashup with the L0wl1f3 podcast!!
E17 – The Terminator
E18 – Cyberpunk (and psychedelic) music with Kavus Torabi of The Utopia Strong!
E19 – Neuromancer, the Sprawl Trilogy, & William Gibson
E20 – Quake
E21 – Minority Report
E22 – Cyberpunk Day special!!!
E23 – Cyberpunk body horror
E24 – Cyberpunk: Edgerunners
E25 – Christmas special: best cyberpunk of 2022!!!
E26 – Judge Dredd (vs Dredd!)
E27 – Cyberpunk 2077 (season finale!)
E28 – Bonus episode! Neo Cyberpunk: Volume 3 trailer
E29 – Audio trailer for DARK FICTION by Jon Richter
E30 – Hosts' big night out! (Plus Fanatical's Cyberpunk Dystopia Bundle)

S2/

E31 – Pluto
E32 – The Peripheral (with Tim Standish)
E33 – Audio extract from Scarred by co-Host Jon Richter
E34 – Fallout
E35 – Cowboy Bebop (with Killtopia creator Dave Cook)
E36 – Red Dwarf
E37 – Demolition Man (with Matthew A Goodwin)
E38 – Iain M Banks
E39 – Gareth L Powell talks William Gibson's Burning Chrome and other influences
E40 – Larry Kuperman from Nightdive Studios talks System Shock, science fiction, and the art of video game preservation
E41 – Westworld
E42 – Christmas special with ultra-exclusive guest... err, ChatGPT
E43 – Terminator Zero (with James L Graetz)
E44 – Alita: Battle Angel
E45 – The Fifth Element (with Don Hartshorn)
E46 – Strange Days
E47 – Altered Carbon (with T R Napper)
E48 – Casshern
E49 – The Matrix trilogy (with Keith Anthony Baird)
E50 – Nemesis
E51 – Peruvian cyberpunk with Gustaffo Vargas
E52 – Hardware (bonus episode from the Dark Natter archives – the first time Jon and Matt met!)
E53 – Season finale!! Ghost In The Shell (2017 live action movie)

S3/

E54 – Hosts In The Shell season 3: a shambolic cyber-trailer!
E55 – Ghost In The Shell: Standalone Complex
E56 – Watch Dogs: Legion (with SD Miller)
E57 – Alien: Earth
E58 – Elysium (with Phil Stitelmann)
E59 – I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream
E60 – Cyberpunk villains (with Tim Standish)
E61 – Short Circuit
E62 – An interview with Hugh Howey, creator of the Silo series
E63 – Mad Max
E64 – An interview with Bruce Bethke, author of 'Cyberpunk' (and inventor of the word!)
E65 – Streets of Rage
E66 – An interview with Adrian Tchaikovsky, author of Children of Time and Shadows of the Apt
E67 – Robocop (the 2014 remake)
E68 – Philip K. Dick (with multi-award-winning cyberpunk author T R Napper)
E69 – Fallout (season 2)
E70 – An interview with Richard K Morgan, author of Altered Carbon! (Part 1)

HIGH TECH. LOW LIFE. TWO CYBER-IDIOTS WITH MICROPHONES.

Looking at that list, what makes me happiest isn't really the number of episodes (there are more on the way) but rather the trajectory.

We started because two writers discovered they could happily enjoy an hour arguing about cyberpunk. Since then we've talked to indie writers, filmmakers, comic creators, musicians, game people, award winners, bestselling authors and some genuine architects of the genre.

And yet it still basically feels like Jon and me having the a fun conversation just like we had that first time on Dark Natter.

Only now, occasionally, Richard K. Morgan is sitting there too.

Which is frankly flipping ridiculous but wonderful!?

So if your idea of a good time involves replicants, cyborgs, megacorps, murderous artificial intelligences, dystopian wastelands, questionable 1990s straight-to-video action movies, cybernetic existential crises and two middle-aged British authors arguing about whether something is actually cyberpunk...

You have found your people.

Welcome to the Shell.

We have such sights to show you.

Jack into Hosts In The Shell on Buzzsprout

Read my last post about the podcast HERE

>>> Imagine a cyberpunk world where the Earth is becoming hell? One man with powers and his robot sidekick might be our only hope... This is high tech / low life meeting the forces of hell!?

Click banner below to hear a FREE 5 mins sample of my audiobook which is becoming a graphic novel too)...

THERE IS NO ANTIMEMETICS DIVISION review (or is there?)

2026-09-14T16:43:47.354+01:00

THERE IS NO ANTIMEMETICS DIVISION (or is there?)

by QNTM

reviewed by █████ Adcock

I read There Is No Antimemetics Division on my trip to Palestine.

Apparently.

I remember opening it. I remember thinking this is exactly my sort of sci-fi-shit. I remember something about ███████████, and a woman called Marie Quinn and the deeply upsetting possibility that the reason you can’t remember where you put your keys isn’t middle age but actually an extra-dimensional conceptual predator chewing pieces out of your brain.

After that things get a little… ██████████████.

qntm’s spectacularly weird sci-fi horror asks ‘how the fuck do you fight something when remembering it exists is precisely what you can’t do?’

Welcome to the Antimemetics Division.

No, this is not your first day.

Oh.

Fuck.

Imagine The X-Files getting drunk with House of Leaves and you might be somewhere close.

Antimemes themselves are ideas/entities/things which resist being remembered or communicated. And qntm doesn’t just use that as a clever monster gimmick. He lets the infection eat the novel itself. Information vanishes. Documents lie. People disappear. Connections you thought you understood suddenly have █████████ where their emotional support beams used to be.

At one point we get the deliciously broken:

“we can't even write the reason why we can't write it down down,”

Which may be the most accurate synopsis possible.

There’s something genuinely horrible here too. Not jump-scare horrible. Not there’s a bloke with an axe behind the shower curtain horrible. This is ontological horror. The growing suspicion that reality has already lost and nobody noticed because not noticing is literally how the enemy works. It made my brain itch in the best possible way.

And then forget that it was itching.

████████████████████████████████████
██████ DO NOT THINK ABOUT THIS ██████
████████████████████████████████████

The prose moves like a bastard. It’s funny, horrible and occasionally weirdly moving, often overlapping. Full of people trying to save humanity using memory drugs, bureaucracy, insane contingency plans and the desperate hope that somebody wrote something down before everyone forgot why the fuck they were holding the pen.

And buried in all that nightmare fuel is possibly the coolest mission statement in recent sci-fi:

“Ideas can be killed… With better ideas.”

YES.

That’s the good shit.

Because underneath the antimemes, ████████ and reality-devouring horrors, There Is No Antimemetics Division is ultimately about something surprisingly human: what remains of us when memory goes? If love is forgotten, did it matter? If nobody remembers your sacrifice, was it still heroic?

I had thoughts about this but unfortunately ████████████████████████████████████████████████████.

So.

Should you read it?

Absolutely.

Have I explained what happens?

No.

Could I?

███████████████.

Did it happen at all?

Out of a potential 5, you have to go with a Darkmatters:

ööööö

(5 - because ████████████████████. Wait. Which book were we talking about?..)

>>> Imagine a cyberpunk world where the Earth is becoming hell? One man with powers and his robot sidekick might be our only hope... This is high tech / low life meeting the forces of hell!?

Click banner below to hear a FREE 5 mins sample of my audiobook which is becoming a graphic novel too)...

T R Napper Interview

2026-08-12T20:59:17.028+01:00

Matt Adcock (@cleric20)

meets T R Napper (@TRNapper)

With his latest book 'This Machine Kills Billionaires' hot off the press, I got to ask the man himself some questions... Check my review of the book here

Matt: Was This Machine Kills Billionaires born from righteous political anger or ???

T R: Strangely enough I don’t think it was anger, although I can see how a reader might wonder. Obviously, the seed of the story came from current events – oligarchy, dizzying technological progress, and the fusion of the two. But this duo are also core concerns of cyberpunk, and in that way, something I’ve written about throughout my career.

Matt: Huldo is being taught ethics by people who ultimately want to own, regulate and monetise it. How should / can we control something potentially godlike?

T R: Well we can’t. That’s the whole problem.

Matt: The book commits the dangerous act of making the reader occasionally think, “Well, perhaps the murder machine has a point.” How much fun was it pushing us across that moral line before making us realise where we were standing?

T R: I’m glad that was your reaction, and I’m glad it made you think. While I have very strong political and ethical convictions, I’m not much interested in beating the reader over the head with them. The most engaging stories, for me, have a certain ambiguity at their heart, and force the reader to think for themselves.

The thing is, I was pushing myself across that line. I was taking a certain type of moral imperative to its limit, and seeing where I ended up. It’s fair to say there was a certain vicarious pleasure in writing the demise of several (fictional) odious billionaires – but by the same token, the story forces you to think about the difficult questions even this poses. Something that seems quite simple is actually fiendishly complex.

Matt: Cyberpunk has always been suspicious of corporations, but the real world now appears to be competing aggressively with the genre. Is it getting harder to write dystopian satire?

T R: I don’t think it’s harder to be writing dystopias, because the permutations and evolutions of dystopia are myriad, and they are a fascinating territory to explore. We are living in a timeline that sees us slowing sliding into dystopia, where inch by inch day by day we give up more of ourselves and our autonomy. We’re sleep walking into this future, and I think art is one place we can effectively call this out.

As for satire, this is certainly harder. How many times have you gone onto social media and wondered if a headline is from The Onion, or a deliberate troll, or real life?

Distinguishing the real, in general, is becoming much more difficult, I should add. Videos, pictures, text – indeed objective reality – has been shattered and so many are living in their own shards.

Matt: You’re brilliant at showing that technology rarely destroys everybody equally. The wealthy get immortality, optimisation and private bunkers; everyone else gets an app informing them they’ve been replaced. Can cyberpunk represent against the uber rich?

T R: Thank you. I mean William Gibson said it: the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed. One of the things I’ve felt important in cyberpunk is to explore what the future does to us, and how specific groups of people experience the future differently.

As a character says in one of the bonus short stories contained in the collection: ‘If you were poor, you suffered the future shock. Your whole world turned upside down. But for the rich, the future was just a news item. Never a shock, not even an inconvenience.’

Cyberpunk can certainly call this out, and place it in narrative form, so I suppose that in this sense it can represent. But what changes? I’m not sure, mate, but by god we need to maintain our rage.

Matt: Huldo can examine morality at a scale and speed humans cannot, but it learns its values from humans, which seems less like education and more like deliberately infecting a new intelligence. Did writing it make you more or less hopeful about AGI?

T R: The vision I have here is of the best possible AGI. It would’ve been easy to show a malicious one, or chromium skeletons with glowing red eyes. But I thought it far more interesting to show a new god that is, at its core, a deeply moral being. The book, I hope, shows the flaws in allowing even the most benevolent of tyrants to gain absolute power. No one being should hold this much power, and yet Silicon Valley and its equivalents across the globe are desperately trying to create the singularity.

The question of god (in the form of an AGI) forces us – among other things – to consider free will, because here is a god that might deny a choice it doesn’t agree with. A new god, any god, that can actively manifest its will in reality, is terrifying.

LLMs won’t gain these powers. They are a dead end in terms of the development of AGI. I tend to think it is further away than some currently claim (I still believe true AGI is decades away, at minimum, and do not believe such a creation will ever be self-aware).

Matt: Imagine Huldo has read your complete back catalogue and is now conducting your ethical performance review. Does T. R. Napper survive and what incriminating evidence does the machine find first?

T R: Oh Huldo would barely glance at me. I was a humanitarian aid worker for a decade, and I’ve working in the disability sector for the last seven years, in addition to my writing. I work also work with military personnel suffering PTSD, in an arts therapy program.

I’m one of those chumps who’s never motivated by money. A fool who’s never sought to enrich himself at the expense of others. Whatever my numerous flaws, none are of the psychopathic CEO/Dictator strain that would draw the attention of Huldo.

I’m small fry, and Huldo is only interested in the whales.

Matt: The stories are angry, but they are not nihilistic. Community, loyalty and small acts of care keep surviving in the wreckage. Do you consciously need that thread of humanity in your work, or does it fight its way in despite your best dystopian efforts?

T R: I’ve always argued that cyberpunk is a humanist literature. So I don’t think I have to do it consciously as such, as I always start from the human. I’m always interested in the human cost of this dizzying technological progress, the consequences of the reckless greed of the ruling class.

My approach, in a way, begins from community, dignity, loyalty, and love, and if it’s angry it’s because I’m angry at what is happening to us, and if it is bleak, it is because our most plausible futures are looking quite bleak.

Our humanity is worth fighting for. That is the essence of cyberpunk.

Grab your copies of T R Napper's books and find out more about him here

>>> Imagine a cyberpunk world where the Earth is becoming hell? One man with powers and his robot sidekick might be our only hope... This is high tech / low life meeting the forces of hell!?

Click banner below to hear a FREE 5 mins sample of my audiobook which is becoming a graphic novel too)...

Matt gets The Shards through the heart (review)

2026-08-07T21:39:09.168+01:00

THE SHARDS (or Everybody’s Gorgeous, Everybody’s Lying and Somebody’s Killing People)…

Reviewed by Matt Adcock (@cleric20)

“It’s getting a little tense in here… maybe we should hot-tub it?”

I absolutely loved The Shards novel, I read it on The Orient Express last year.

It’s an obsessive, queasy love. I’m a Bret Easton Ellis lifer anyway, yes, all of it, even the stuff people like to wave away but The Shards hit especially hard, this vast sun-drenched paranoid fever memory of being young, rich-adjacent, horny, terrified and convinced that the beautiful new guy at school might actually be a serial killer. Or he might not. Which is worse really because once Bret starts joining the dots you start joining them too and soon everybody is suspect and Los Angeles itself feels like it’s watching you through mirrored Ray-Bans.

it's the '80s bitch...

Ryan Murphy can do immaculate depravity almost better than anyone alive… The Shards needs glamour, obviously, but it needs the rot underneath it even more. Thankfully this feels like Murphy finding exactly the right frequency again. Everything is ridiculously gorgeous: the cars, pools, bodies (both male and female), shirts, impossible California skies, houses nobody I knew at school lived in over here in the UK but there’s a thin smear of dread over absolutely everything. Like Less Than Zero got infected by Michael Mann’s Manhunter.

Igby Rigney makes a convincing young Bret, which is no small thing because he has to be simultaneously arrogant, frightened, observant, manipulative, secretive, horny and probably wrong about half of what he thinks he knows. He’s watching everybody whilst also constantly worrying that somebody is watching him. I really liked that the performance doesn’t try to make him particularly cuddly either. This is Ellis-world, nobody needs redeeming for the audience. People behave badly, have complicated sex, say stupid things, lie to each other, then drive home in magnificent cars.

music videos are going to be big...

And then Robert Mallory arrives. Oh Robert, you magnificent wanker. Homer Gere plays him with that vital quality the book absolutely depends on… you can understand instantly why everyone would want him around whilst simultaneously wanting someone to check his basement. He’s beautiful in a slightly unreal way, like somebody generated the perfect private-school boyfriend minus a soul. Bret’s decision-making throughout the novel ribs the jock itch of the tight-trousered sex gods and the show follows suit admirably!!

The Trawler killings give the series its nasty propulsion and they are grim, think Hannibal tableaus (one corpse has a girl whose breasts have been cut off and replaced with dead cats heads…) but I still don’t really think The Shards is “about” a serial killer. That’s just the lurid hook. What Ellis got me with in the book, and what this unexpectedly gets right too, is the horrible sadness of looking backwards at a time when you didn’t know what was coming. These kids are driving around LA doing drugs, shagging whoever they shouldn’t, worrying about parties and relationships and who likes who, believing this is simply what life is now. Meanwhile we’re watching from the future knowing AIDS is coming, knowing adulthood is coming, knowing that almost none of these friendships will survive in the form they currently imagine. It gives the stupid teenage stuff a ghostly edge that I loved.

That’s where the soundtrack absolutely kills too. Murphy knows what music can do to memory and deploys it shamelessly, sometimes almost ridiculously, but I’m powerless against this sort of thing. The book gives you songs and bands to check out, e.g. I found Icehouse whose ‘Great Southern Land’ cos it’s Bret and Susan’s favourite track and now they are a fav of mine too …

So give me an empty LA road at night, some expensive sadness, a synth line and a beautiful person making an obviously catastrophic emotional decision and it’s like David Lynch is back. There are moments here that feel less like scenes than memories from a life I absolutely did not live, which sounds daft written down but that’s The Shards all over. Ellis somehow makes nostalgia for someone else’s fucked-up adolescence contagious.

Is it exactly the book? No, although he starts line for line but things shift, things compress, Murphy Murphy-fies certain moments and occasionally you can feel him admiring his own gorgeousness for a beat too long.

The important bits survived: the head fucking uncertainty. Is Robert genuinely dangerous or has Bret turned attraction, jealousy and fear into an enormous private conspiracy? How much of what we’re seeing can we trust? How much does Bret himself believe? The novel leaves those questions buzzing around your skull - like a trapped fly trying to burrow its way out through your eyeballs… and the series manages the same nasty trick.

Also Kaia Gerber is great as Susan, especially because Susan has to represent something almost impossible for Bret, normality, friendship, desire, history, possibly love, possibly just the idea of the life he thinks he should want. The whole friendship group gradually cracking apart feels convincing rather than merely plotty, and once suspicion gets into the bloodstream there’s something grimly enjoyable about watching every tiny interaction become potential evidence.

I know there will be viewers who find it slow. They are not wrong, exactly. It iskinda slow. It likes hanging around. It likes expensive rooms and cigarettes and glances and people saying something ordinary while clearly meaning something else. I happen to love that. I don’t need a body every fifteen minutes. Give me paranoia. Give me unreliable memory. Give me LA looking like heaven whilst somebody screams somewhere just beyond the swimming pool.

I’m admittedly protective of a novel I love and fully prepared to be That Guy muttering “well actually…” at the screen. Instead, somewhere along the way, it got me.

The sunshine, the sex, the dread, the stupid beautiful doomed teenagers, the suspicion that everybody knows something Bret doesn’t.

Ryan Murphy has made The Shards pretty much exactly as it existed in my head, what a tasty bastard!!

Out of a potential 5, you have to go with a Darkmatters:

ööööö

(5 - 5 suspiciously perfect Robert Mallory smiles out of 5..)

>>> Imagine a cyberpunk world where the earth is becoming hell? One man with powers and his robot sidekick might be our only hope... This is high tech / low life meeting the forces of hell!?

Click banner below to hear a FREE 5 mins sample of my audiobook which is becoming a graphic novel too)...

Matt discovers that This Machine Kills Billionaires

2026-07-31T20:22:16.081+01:00

Matt discovers that This Machine Kills Billionaires…

and possibly your remaining faith in the future too!?

T. R. Napper (Doctor of Cyberpunk)

Reviewed by Matt Adcock (@Cleric20)

This Machine Kills Billionaires lands with all the subtlety of a cybernetic fist coming through the reinforced window of a private space yacht, and it demands your attention!

As a fan of TR Napper's work including Neon Leviathan, 36 Streets, Ghost of the Neon God, and The Escher Man - I was excited to get my hands on his new work: a collection of cyber tech-revenge fantasy…

This is a book that will burrow into your brain while you are enjoying the story, then start quietly rearranging your synapses.

At the black heart of the collection is The Hidden God, in which philosopher Izanami ‘Izzy’ Jones is employed to teach ethics to Huldo, the world’s first genuine Artificial General Intelligence. Because apparently the ultra-rich have finally decided that creating a digital god capable of transforming civilisation might require somebody to tick the morality box before unleashing it.

Gotta read em all!

Good thinking, lads. Nothing could possibly go wrong.

Izzy approaches the job with the weary resignation of somebody who knows she has largely been hired as intellectual window dressing. Her employer does not really want an ethical machine; he wants his machine officially declared ethical so he can own it, monetise it and presumably stick a subscription tier on human destiny.

So what if removing one person could save thousands? What if that person knowingly profits from suffering? What if the machine can prove not only what they have done, but what they will do next? It’s a fun premise!!

This is where Napper really gets his augmented claws in. The premise could easily have become a cold exercise in cleverness, with Ethicsbot presenting Trolley Problem 2.0 while various humans stroke their chins and look concerned. Instead, it becomes an increasingly tense collision between moral theory and actual blood.

It is exhilarating, horrifying and guiltily satisfying, because Napper knows exactly where the reader’s sympathies are likely to go when the targets are obscenely wealthy men whose fortunes rest on misery. Then, just as you start becoming a little too comfortable with the arrangement, he twists the blade.

Napper writes cyberpunk without treating it like a fancy-dress party. There is no desperate need to keep pointing at the neon, polishing the chrome or announcing that somebody has a cool coat. The punk matters here. The anger matters. This is fiction about who gets crushed beneath technological progress and, more importantly, who owns the machinery doing the crushing.

Highway Requiem takes us onto the Australian roads with a truck driver and his dog, Roxy. It is quiet erosion of somebody’s livelihood, dignity and place in the world. While automation rarely announces itself as an agent of the apocalypse, it’s just replacing us and the road will continue to be travelled without you.

Burned Like Coal is furious and tragic, following young people who have concluded that polite protest is simply another noise the system has learned to ignore. There is an AI, there are explosives, and there are choices being made by people who feel the future has already been stolen from them. This is a future on fire and you’ll be left with scorch marks :).

Then Jack’s Fine Dining delivers something different again: community, hunger and human decency surviving in the cracks of a brutal society. Napper understands that feeding people can become a revolutionary act when the system is designed to let them starve.

That might be what holds the collection together. Not simply artificial intelligence or dystopian technology, but resistance in the classic high tech / low life vibe. Who gets labelled a terrorist while somebody destroying entire communities is described as an entrepreneur? When the existing rules protect only those who wrote them, what exactly does ethical behaviour look like?

Napper does not give easy answers…

The result is compact, angry, thrilling and worryingly plausible. I have been a fan of Napper’s work for some time, and had the joy of chatting to him on Hosts in the Shell recently (which only confirmed that he is indeed the real deal when it comes to cyberpunk!!).

AI evangelists promise liberation while corporations calculate how many humans they can remove from the payroll. Climate catastrophe accelerates while the people profiting from it buy increasingly elaborate bunkers. The people building our future often appear to be precisely those who should not be allowed anywhere near it. Sounds a bit familiar yeah?

This Machine Kills Billionaires is excellent cyberpunk of the highest order… Whip smart without being smug, loaded with political thinking and packing tasty violence too.

Napper has not just built a machine that kills billionaires but one that probably already knows what you are thinking.

COMPLY?

Out of a potential 5, you have to go with a Darkmatters:

ööööö

(5 - Revolutionary cyberpunk that engages the brain, the conscience and more...)

>>> Imagine a cyberpunk world where the earth is becoming hell? One man with powers and his robot sidekick might be our only hope... This is high tech / low life meeting the forces of hell!?

Click banner below to hear a FREE 5 mins sample of my audiobook which is becoming a graphic novel too)...

Trainspotting: The Musical (review)

2026-07-31T19:47:02.170+01:00

Trainspotting: The Musical

Matt Adcock (@Cleric20)

Choose erm…

Trainspotting is one of my favourite novels. The film sits in my all-time top ten. I wanted this to work far more than I expected.

And there’s no shortage of talent on stage. The cast absolutely commit, the energy never drops and there are moments when you catch a glimpse of the raw humanity that made Irvine Welsh’s story such a phenomenon.

Unfortunately, it just never really catches fire and even the songs borrowed from the film soundtrack only serve to make you remember how much better that is...

Anyone wanna put T2 on?

Yeah the music. Trainspotting has always had music pumping through its veins, from Welsh’s writing to Boyle’s legendary soundtrack. Here though, the original songs rarely land and even the cover versions feel oddly like karaoke; competent, enthusiastic even, but never dangerous or memorable.

Maybe that’s what I missed most: the sense of danger.

The book feels like the best punch in the mouth you'll ever get. The film practically vibrates with reckless ‘90s energy and even T2: Trainspotting is poignant and heartbreaking as it pours over 'what might have been'.

This production is much more polite than either. It wants to move you, but too often stops to explain itself when the story was always powerful enough to do that alone.

The best bits here are when the cast are not singing - which is a problem when it's a musical...

I genuinely admire everyone involved. There’s a huge amount of work, talent and heart on that stage. I just came away wishing they’d trusted Welsh’s story a little more… and the songs a little less.

Choose life?

I’m still choosing the novel & film…

My comic characters in the iconic poses...

Out of a potential 5, you have to go with a Darkmatters:

öö

(2 - lacking a lust for life...)

My review / ranking of Irvine Welsh's:

>>> Trainspotting books

>>> Films n TV

>>> Imagine a world where the earth is becoming hell? One man with powers and his robot sidekick might be our only hope...

Click banner below to hear a FREE 5 mins sample of my audiobook which is becoming a graphic novel too)...

HOSTS IN THE SHELL A cyberpunk podcast

2026-06-07T13:07:41.767+01:00

HOSTS IN THE SHELL

A cyberpunk podcast by Matt (@cleric20) Adcock & Jon (@RichterWrites) Richter

@cleric20 🦾 #HostsintheShell ♬ original sound - Matt Adcock

IT’S JUDGEMENT DAY…

No, not because Skynet has finally gone online (give it time), but because Hosts In The Shell Season 3 is almost here.

What started as two cyberpunk obsessives talking about movies, books, games, AI, transhumanism and whatever shiny dystopian nightmare had caught our attention that week has somehow evolved into something rather special.

Over the first two seasons we’ve racked up 54 episodes exploring the very best (and occasionally gloriously worst) that cyberpunk has to offer. We’ve jacked into classics including Blade Runner, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, The Matrix, Strange Days, Altered Carbon, Casshern and Nemesis, while also venturing down stranger side streets of the genre.

Along the way we’ve been lucky enough to chat with some fantastic guests, including cyberpunk author T.R. Napper, sci-fi author Gareth L Powell, graphic novelists Gustaffo Vargas, Bryan Talbot, S C Jensen and Dave Cook, and a ‘host’ of creators such as Tim Standish, T R Napper, James L Graetz, Anna Mocikat, C.T Phipps etc helping to shape the future of speculative fiction.

'Jon Richter poses for his close up'

Last year we were delighted to receive our 10,000 downloads badge, proof that there are at least ten thousand occasions when somebody somewhere thought:

“You know what I need right now? Two middle-aged nerds talking about cyberpunk.”

Yeah - we are as surprised as anyone!?

Now we’re back. (click this image to hear the podcast):

Season 3 promises our biggest and most exciting guest line-up yet, including Hugh Howey (Silo), Bruce Bethke (the man who coined the term cyberpunk), and Adrian Tchaikovsky, one of the most imaginative science-fiction writers working today.

Expect deep dives into cyberpunk culture, future tech, artificial intelligence, science fiction, gaming, movies, literature and all the weird places where humanity and technology collide. There will be insight. There will be enthusiasm. There will almost certainly be tangents.

Whether you’ve been with us since episode one or you’re preparing to jack in for the first time, Season 3 is shaping up to be our biggest yet.

So charge your neural implants, polish your chrome and prepare your audio receptors for maximum stimulation.

Hosts In The Shell Season 3 >>> launching soon.

The future isn’t evenly distributed, but apparently it does now have a podcast.

>>> Imagine a world where the earth is becoming hell? One man with powers and his robot sidekick might be our only hope...

Click banner below to hear a FREE 5 mins sample of my audiobook which is becoming a graphic novel too)...

Dissociation Delirium review (and Phil Stitelmann interview)

2026-06-05T17:39:52.636+01:00

Dissociation Delirium

Phil Stitelmann (@Phil_Stit)

Reviewed by Matt Adcock (@cleric20)

There’s a particular flavour of cyberpunk that doesn’t care about neon cool, trench coats, or whether your katana glows in the dark. It just wants to drag you face-first through a poison corporate sewer and leave your nervous system twitching in an alley somewhere behind a biotech nightclub. Phil Stitelmann’s Dissociation Delirium is very much that.

Be warned: This is mean little fiction. Lean, poisoned, angry and excitingly - just the start of a series!!

Stitelmann takes the well-worn cyberpunk staples, including augmentation, burnout, corporate ownership of the soul and strips away the romanticism until all that’s left is panic sweat and malfunctioning meat. Think cybernetic psychosis and identity fracture with a kind of grim conviction that feels spiritually descended from early Neuromancer alleyways, filtered through the body-horror migraines of David or Brendan Cronenberg.

What really works is the nastiness of it all. Every page feels like somebody trying jam an infected neural link directly into the skull.

Cyberpunk often disappears up its own augmented backside with endless lore dumps and fetishistic worldbuilding. Dissociation Delirium instead behaves like a panic attack in prose form. Fast. Claustrophobic. Ugly in a deliberate way. The brevity makes it hit harder because there’s no escape hatch, no comfortable distance from the collapse.

This is a drunk 3am after too much tequila and caffeine, where your thoughts are sponsored by a pharmaceutical company.

Delightful I AM A PIG stuff.

Stitelmann GETS that the best cyberpunk isn’t really about technology GETTING inside the nervous system.

DO YOU COMMIT?

Out of a potential 5, you have to go with a Darkmatters:

ööööö

(5 - Cyberpunk necessity for burnouts everywhere!)

I got the chance to interview Phil and here's what he said >>>

Matt: Dissociation Delirium feels like it’s broadcasting from a future where identity itself has become corrupted software. Do you think cyberpunk’s greatest horror is no longer the machine… but the collapse of the self?

Phil: Consciousness and self are at the core of Cyberpunk. Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell have shown us that replicants or cyborgs could be more human than humans. Which logically leaves the human part in decay.

Today’s society has already dissolved part of the self: you’re who you voted for, what brand you buy, what side of the culture war you stand on. You take jobs that don’t match your values or skills because you need to pay for a life dictated by a system hellbent on crushing you.

This, more than anything, resonates the strongest with me: corporate culture – a soulless, spirit-crushing, mean-spirited and greedy monster. Imagine that the “hen and pig” pep talk from Dissociation Delirium is actually taken from a REAL workplace anecdote I actually lived through 13 years ago!

As Angie NightFire, my rockstar character, would say in one of her songs:

“You're wired up, and they pull the strings,

Caught in the contract, trapped in their schemes.

Goddamn cybernetic chains, they’ve taken it all,

Once you were human, now you're bound to fall.“

Now, buckle up, for DD is only the beginning. There’s so much more coming on this topic in the upcoming short stories, but most of all the novels!

Matt: Your story has that grimy, late-night neon dread that recalls classic cyberpunk, but it also feels painfully modern. Which version of the future scares you more: the corporate dystopias of the ’80s, or the algorithmic soft-control world we’re drifting into now?

Phil: You’re right: I’m trying to bring Cyberpunk into the modern era, with themes that are very contemporary and technology that comes from today’s paradigm, tuned up to eleven.

Now, there’s a lot of neon and readers will find the classic Cyberpunk tropes in my stories, but it all feels rotten to the core, dirty and toxic. Neo Los Angeles, a character in itself in my universe, is the place where dreams – and dreamers – come to die, where the weak perish and the strong struggle. No one leaves this universe intact. I strongly believe we need such a wakeup call today.

To me, the 80s’ dystopia has, in part, come true. Corporate control, fall of governments’ ability to manage societies, technological predominance in every aspect of our lives. I’ve actually written a thesis on this topic via a series of articles: we’re already living in a cyberpunk world.

But one thing’s missing: the actual popular rebellion. Which brings me to the answer to your question: we’ve come from Gibson’s or Pondsmith’s hard science dystopia to some soft, algorithmically-controlled world where people consume social media and struggle through a life that’s no longer really their own. As a friend of mine said to me the other day: “The future was better before.”

I can feel the public anger rise, year after year, as tech progress exponentially and leaves more and more people behind (Pondsmith’s Techno Shock concept), but the actual Fall isn’t yet in sight.

Again, as my Angie would scream during one of her main songs: “WHERE’S YOUR FUCKING RAGE?”

Matt: If you could jack one piece of fictional cyberpunk tech directly into your own nervous system tomorrow what would you get?

Phil: That’s a tough one. Working in tech, I know damn well that any piece of connected software can and will be hacked, and/or turned into a software subscription service to keep working. Real Black Mirror stuff right there. But that aside, I think a cognition enhancement implant would be my absolute go to. Anything to make me think better and faster, and keep focus. I can’t help but feel limited by my meat brain!

Matt: There’s a great kind of emotional decay running underneath the violence in your writing. Do you see cyberpunk as fundamentally nihilistic, or secretly one of the most human genres around?

Phil: Cyberpunk started as nihilistic, following the Latin and Anglo-Saxon trend of focusing on the self, on the microcosm. How can you save the world if you can’t even save yourself?

That’s pretty much the basis of Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk Roleplaying Game. Trust no one. Save yourself.

I’m more of the Germanic school of thought: save yourself so you can then save the world. In this paradigm, sacrificing oneself for the macrocosm means succeeding in life (pun intended). Hence my saga’s subtitle:

“An Epic Cyberpunk Story of Love, Rebellion and Sacrifice”.

Answering the question: I strongly believe that, at the heart of all this darkness, cold tech and neo-ultra-capitalism, lies the heart of the true human soul. Love. Loyalty. Friendship. Sacrifice.

In DD, Bob falls victim to the rotten, decaying system he adores. The protagonists of Digital Gods and Fallen Angels choose a different path. They fight back. Not only for themselves, but for each other, and ultimately for the future of humanity itself.

It’s that humanity that transcends the genre.

Matt: Which writers or films first infected you with the cyberpunk virus?

Phil: Being born in 1979, Blade Runner, of course. Then Akira and Ghost in the Shell.

I discovered the classic authors later, mainly Philip K Dick. He’s my main inspiration for DD – hence the quote at the beginning of the novella.

Matt: What are your top 3 cyberpunk media?

Phil:

Number 1: The Cyberpunk 2077 video game comes first. No contest. The storytelling in the game is, to me, an absolute masterpiece. It is what prompted me to drop everything and write my own story.

I also adore the transmedia concept. Visuals and music contribute to total immersion. I’m trying to do something similar with my books by adding actual music I compose to the stories! For DD, the Angie NightFire song is available on my Patreon!

Number 2: The Matrix. Where to start there? More than twenty years ago now, I wrote a research paper on Lacan’s Real and its Veil. The Matrix was part of my corpus of study. I adore this movie, the philosophy and human element wrapped in eye candy and cool kung fu. What can I say? I’m a geek through and through.

Number 3: Both Blade Runners. Consciousness and what it means to be human became prevalent themes for me after watching the first one. Then Villeneuve’s 2049 released and I must confess I really enjoyed the underlying theme of loneliness and quest for meaning for a character ultimately condemned to irrelevance. Hard. Bleak. Heartbreaking. Loved it.

Cyberpunk Edgerunners would come number 4, if allowed. The narrative structure (a group of mercs navigating their dystopian city) comes close to my own universe. Plus, you get your heart broken at the end!

If DD owes a lot to Philip K. Dick, then Digital Gods and Fallen Angels probably owes more to Blade Runner, The Matrix and Cyberpunk 2077.

Matt: Your prose has that sharp “too much caffeine and existential terror at 3am” energy. What does your actual writing environment look like / ambient synths and glowing monitors, or is every wall just a filled with the word COMMIT?

Phil: I do COMMIT to my craft, I’ll give you that! My office at home is filled with neon (screens, keyboard, mouse, gaming pc, colors everywhere!) and Cyberpunk 2077 figurines, along with a cool thermal katana and Skippy gun replica! I listen to atmospheric, ambient music while writing to get me in the zone.

I also have an electric guitar (Ibanez Joe Satriani edition), a digital piano and a synth keyboard for compositions nearby. They helped me record themes for Angie NightFire’s songs!

As for coffee… I really should try and cut down a little. Really, I should.

Matt: Cyberpunk often predicts technology frighteningly well, but it rarely predicts hope. Do you think the genre still has room for redemption, spirituality, or genuine human connection?

Phil: That’s PRECISELY what makes this genre so powerful in my eyes. Also, on a side note, it’s one of the many reasons why Arcane worked so well: because the characters struggle against hardship and injustice in a seemingly hopeless world that we, the audience, root for them, love them and cry for them.

It’s the struggle and injustice that triggers something deep and raw within us humans and that’s what I’m bringing with Digital Gods and Fallen Angels.

To quote one of my most mysterious characters in my upcoming saga of novels:

"It is only in the most pitch black of darkness that the faintest light shines brightest."

As for spirituality, there’s plenty to discover and delve into in my books. Technology and digitization are redefining spirituality like never before. Can an AI reach sentience? And if yes, can it understand and know love? Can it believe in something greater than itself? Could it become a guardian for humanity? An Angel of sorts?

What place do humans still retain in such an equation? Will we worship an ASI like a god when it’s done taking everything from us? That’s the very premise of my books with – spoiler alert – the Church of the Singularity and the rise of the Digital Gods.

These questions eventually become the central conflict of Digital Gods and Fallen Angels.

On human connection: we’re already on a downward spiral with social media. I push this even further with the Ether, a fully haptic metaverse sensorium – built upon the legacy OSI network structure with an added haptic-feedback layer – where people waste their lives feeling as much as they can while avoiding the real world. In such a world, my characters long for actual human contact and will fight to the bitter end to preserve whatever little they have.

Matt: In a world of AI-generated everything, deepfakes, neural feeds and collapsing attention spans, do you think reality itself is becoming cyberpunk faster than fiction can keep up?

Phil: My postulate is that we’re already living in a Cyberpunk world. In this regard, we authors are now describing current events rather than warning about a possible future. Yes, reality is now moving faster, things are getting crazier and I feel like authors struggle to keep up. I started writing Digital Gods and Fallen Angels more than 4 years ago and already had to update several key technological items due to current progress.

Also, the rise of AI-generated content and deepfakes has made us enter what anthropologists call the Post-Truth era. This is a disaster of gigantic proportions. If everything you hear, read or watch can be unrecognizably faked, then you simply can’t trust anything anymore. This smells like societal collapse to me.

Matt: If Dissociation Delirium existed as a lost VHS adaptation from 1994, who directs it, who scores it, and which exhausted actor plays the lead antihero?

Phil: Easy!

Actor: Difficult to imagine a cyberpunk movie adaptation without Keanu Reeves as actor!

Director: Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Strange Days, Point Break… No brainer.

Score: Nine Inch Nails. What else? Something raw, nasty, saturated.

As for Angie NightFire herself: Courtney Love at her most dangerous, in her twenties and with mohawk blue punk hair! (today’s pick would be Taylor Momsen, from the Pretty Reckless).

Funny you should ask this question. I cultivate a furious nostalgia for the 80s and 90s hard rock bands and media. Van Halen, Metallica, Nine Inch Nails, Cradle of Filth, Joe Satriani and Steve Vai… I miss this energy and passion. So I put it in the books! Angie’s music is inspired by this era.

Matt: Final question: ARE YOU A PIG? If readers walk away from Disassociation Delirium with one lingering psychological splinter lodged in their brain, what do you hope it is?

Phil: I’m the one who knocks, who screams against the system from within. Not a pig, even though I’ve known a lot of those during those last 20 years who happily sacrificed their lives for their job and a corporation who didn’t give two shits about them. In this regard, DD is almost autobiographical.

My main hope is that readers will close this novella shaken to their core, wondering what they’ve just read, then stop and think about the world they live in today and where the future’s taking us, their lives and commitment to something that will consume us all if we let it.

After that… I pray that they’ll stick around for what comes next. They’ll gasp and laugh and cry and finish reading with broken hearts in pure Greek-tragedy-catharsis fashion!

At least, that’s the plan.

GET YOUR COPY OF Digital Gods Dissociation Delirium: HERE

Bonus:

https://digital-gods-and-fallen-angels.com/ for the website

https://www.patreon.com/c/PhilStitelmann for Patreon.

>>> Imagine a world where the earth is becoming hell? One man with powers and his robot sidekick might be our only hope...

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Neon Shocks & Nic Parker Interview

2026-05-18T19:51:07.852+01:00

Neon Shocks

Nic Parker (https://www.facebook.com/nic.parker007)

Reviewed by Matt (@Cleric20) Adcock

This book is less a collection and more a grab-bag of nightmares, an eclectic run of horror shorts that refuse to sit neatly in one coffin, if you will.

This isn’t about one flavour of fear. Parker skips between supernatural chillers, grotesque body horror, strange little reality fractures and straight-up unsettling weirdness with the confidence of someone who knows the genre inside out. The result is unpredictable in the best way, you’re never quite sure what kind of darkness you’re about to step into next.

What holds it together is tone, Nic writes with heart and style. There’s a consistent undercurrent of unease, like the world itself is slightly out of joint. Some stories hit fast and hard, others linger, but there’s always that sense that something isn’t right, much like those classic Pan horror anthologies I grew up reading.

Parker is a twisted, sick bunny and some of her very personal likes and fears flow through the stories which bite with sharp, nasty, and often lingering imagery...

Short, strange, and enjoyably unhinged, Neon Shocks feels like flipping through a stack of cursed horror anthologies where every few pages something genuinely disturbing slips through and punches you in the face!

Out of a potential 5, you have to go with a Darkmatters:

ööööö

(5 - Nobody Trusts Anybody Now, And We're All Very Tired.)

'The Return of the Living Nic Parker'

I got to ask Nic some questions - so read on if you want a bit of an insight into her dark mind…

Matt: Neon Shocks feels like a mixtape of nightmares, what kind of mental jukebox are you pulling from when you decide what goes in?

Nic: Hah, good question. Probably my lifetime of nightmares read and watched since childhood. I started with horror comics as a kid, watched movies like Bava's Black Sunday and Howard Hawks' The Thing From Another Planet, then moved on to hunt down the infamous video nasties of the 80s (which were still cut over here in Germany when you managed to track a fifth copy down) in my teens. Add a lot of Stephen King and Clive Barker and the fabulous horror films I managed to catch at genre festivals during the decades. So Neon Shocks is the amalgamation of the horror that dwells inside of me ;-)

Matt: If one story in the collection is secretly “the most you,” which one is it and should we be worried?

Nic: With me you should alway be worried - only thing that keeps me behaving: I'm too cute for jail! I can't actually pick one story I like most as they're all me - that's why I don't have a favourite sub genre in horror. Slasher, ghost story, sci-fi horror, psychological - I adore all aspects of the genre and that love spawns all the stories.

Matt: Your horror swings between the grotesque and the quietly unsettling which scares you more as a writer?

Nic: I don't scare easily at all. I think you can have an absolute ball with the grotesque and - like we say in German - really hit the shit. You can be insidious and let the fear fester inside the reader going the quieter way until the 'whack across the head' revelation.

Matt: There’s a real love of old-school horror DNA in here, what are your top 3 horror films?

Nic: Ever since I first saw it as a kid my favourite film is and will always be Carpenter's The Thing. And I will always love Re-Animator and Fulci's The Beyond.

Matt: You’re in a strange town and someone is out to kill you - who is it most likely to be?

Nic: Ha - whoever it is; I hope he brought the bazooka!

Matt: Be honest: have you ever had to stop writing one of these stories because it got under your own skin?

Nic: Not really. Whatever I can come up with - more terrible things are probably happening somewhere in the real world without anyone knowing.

Matt: Horror often says something sideways about the real world, are we doomed?

Nic: Seeing the incredible amount of creativity and originality in the genre during the last years and the new wave of passionate horror directors that emerged in the genre I'd say there's enough hope for all of us. And speaking of a new hope - as a Star Wars Fan I'd have never thought I'd be so excited about a Star Wars film again as I'm for The Mandalorian And Grogu, John Favreau put his fan heart and soul into this. Also, I firmly believe everything comes in waves. Having lived through the iron curtain age and the fear of nukes and the Chernobyl catastrophe I know things usually become better again after a while. I'm a horrible optimist.

Matt: If one of your stories escaped into the real world, which would cause the most chaos… and which would you secretly want to witness?

Nic: Most surely Careful What You Wish For, the Devil himself doing wages with people would be cool but also wreak a lot of havoc! And this story becoming real would mean Freddie Mercury being alive and back on stage again. So win win for all of us.

Matt: What’s the line you won’t cross or is that line basically a suggestion at this point?

Nic: Well, let me put it this way, I always loved graphic effects and violence in movies, nothing like a flying head and a good disembowelment. But I have a bit of a blockage when it comes to torture porn that's gone way beyond Hostel. Violence should always support the story and I'm not a fan of exaggerated rape/torture scenes just to serve certain tastes.

Matt: What would you like written on your grave?

Nic: It was one hell of a fun ride - and there were cats!

GET YOUR COPY OF NEON SHOCKS: HERE

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Let The Right One In — National Youth Theatre Review

2026-05-15T12:34:09.472+01:00

Let The Right One In — National Youth Theatre, Underbelly Boulevard

Matt (@Cleric20) Adcock

Let The Right One In captured my heart the second I saw the 2008 film (read my review).

I immediately sought out John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel which didn’t just reinvent vampire lore, but reframed it as something painfully human: loneliness, bullying, longing, and the dangerous, intoxicating pull of being truly seen. Even the title itself feels like a whispered warning — lifted from a Let the Right One Slip In lyric — a plea for connection that carries the faintest suggestion you might be inviting in the wrong thing entirely.

So yes, walking into the National Youth Theatre’s take on it at the cool Underbelly Boulevard Soho, there was a flicker of dread. This is sacred ground. Get it wrong and you don’t just miss, you diminish something profound and iconic.

They don’t get it wrong.

This is the right one, a five-star, blood-pumping triumph.

Eli and Oskar (photo credit Johan Persson)

Jack ‘Adolescence’ Thorne’s adaptation, under the direction of James Dacre, wisely avoids trying to recreate the film’s still, snowbound realism. Instead, it leans into something more theatrical, more unstable… A kind of waking nightmare built from movement, shadow, sound and sudden ruptures of violence. It feels less like a retelling and more like being dropped inside Oskar’s anxious inner world.

Which is exactly where this story belongs.

At the centre, Nicky Dune’s Oskar is superb. Bringing brittle awkwardness and suppressed fury. He isn’t just a victim. There’s something simmering underneath, something that makes you understand why Eli doesn’t just find him… she recognises him.

And Rachael Dowsett’s Eli is the real dark miracle here. She avoids every obvious trap, no gothic cliché, no quirky vampire affectations, instead giving us something unsettlingly other. Childlike, yes. Fragile, maybe. But also ancient, watchful, and quietly predatory. Her stillness is as powerful as her movement; when she does move, it’s with intent.

Together, they create that strange, queasy alchemy at the heart of the story. It’s a relationship that feels like salvation and damnation intertwined. A love story, if you like… provided you’re comfortable with the occasional arterial spray.

The ensemble work is sharp too. The NYT company move like a collective consciousness, bullying, circling, closing in. Scenes bleed into one another with dream-logic fluidity. Underbelly’s space becomes a kind of concrete purgatory: dim light, hard edges, nowhere to hide.

And when the violence lands, it lands hard.

underwater love (photo credit Johan Persson)

There’s excellent support too. Michelle Asante brings a grounded warmth to Oskar’s mum who channels a fragile normality in a story rapidly losing its grip on the everyday. Meanwhile Colin Tierney’s Hakan is deeply unsettling, not monstrous in the obvious sense, but tragic, obsessive, and quietly decaying from the inside out.

What this production really understands, that the TV series version missed, is that Let The Right One In is fundamentally about sadness. Not misery for its own sake or even horror for the sake of it, but the deep, hollow ache of being unseen. The horror works because the emotional truth is so sharp.

There’s a moment towards the end when I witnessed the audience falling into a kind of collective silence — not fear exactly, but recognition. The sense that what’s unfolding isn’t just genre storytelling, but something uncomfortably close to real emotional need.

That’s rare but it’s earned.

time isn't kind (photo credit Johan Persson)

The shadow of the original film still looms large, those performances, that tone, but this production doesn’t try to imitate it. It finds its own pulse. Something rawer. More immediate. More theatrical in the best sense.

Out of a potential 5, you have to go with a Darkmatters:

ööööö

(5 - A bloody valentine to outsiders. Let this one in.)

>>> Imagine a world where the earth is becoming hell? One man with powers and his robot sidekick might be our only hope...

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Ranking Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting Book Universe

2026-05-15T11:46:12.736+01:00

Ranking Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting Book Universe

Matt (@cleric20) Adcock

There’s something gloriously dangerous about returning to the world of Trainspotting.

Over the decades, Irvine Welsh has built a sprawling chemical-stained saga around Renton, Sick Boy, Spud and Begbie; a literary universe fuelled by heroin, cheap lager, catastrophic choices and the occasional stab of aching humanity. He certainly likes the Trainspotting spin-off dollar but when the characters are this good, I’m game for it!

Reading them chronologically gives the whole thing the feel of a doomed gangster epic, average lads trying to outrun themselves while Scotland mutates around them.

Here’s my Darkmatters ranking…

6. Dead Men’s Trousers — ★★★☆☆

Welsh attempts the big “one last ride” reunion novel, bringing the old crew back together for another orbit of grudges, scams and existential rot.

There are flashes of brilliance here — especially when the book slows down long enough to let age and regret seep through the cracks — but it often feels like the characters are becoming self-aware legacy acts. Begbie still terrifies, Renton still intellectualises his selfishness, Sick Boy still slithers around like a narcotic given human form… but the electricity has understandably ebbed a little.

Like meeting old rave mates at midday in a pub: warm, funny, faintly tragic.

5. The Blade Artist — ★★★½☆

A bold swing (of the knife)…

Welsh takes Francis Begbie — one of modern fiction’s purest engines of chaos — and asks the unthinkable: what if he actually changed?

Set largely in America, this feels less like a Trainspotting novel and more like a grim psychological thriller wearing Begbie’s face. The violence still erupts like arterial spray across white walls, but underneath is a surprisingly mournful meditation on masculinity, repression and whether monsters can ever really retire.

Not everyomne bought the reinvention, but there’s something admirable about Welsh refusing to simply replay the hits.

4. Skagboys — ★★★★☆

The heroin origin story nobody really needed… until Welsh absolutely nailed it.

Skagboys transforms the gang from already-broken legends into painfully recognisable young men drifting through Thatcher-era collapse, boredom and hopelessness. The tragedy is that we know exactly where all this is heading, yet Welsh somehow makes the descent feel fresh and horrifying anyway.

Some of the funniest writing in the series sits right beside moments of absolute soul-crushing bleakness. Watching Renton slide toward addiction feels like seeing a warning light slowly flicker on but get ignored.

A prequel with actual purpose, which is as rare as a clean toilet in Leith.

3. Porno (or T2) — ★★★★½

Meaner. Sadder. More mature. Lost loves and regrets.

Set years after Trainspotting, this sequel finds the characters older but not remotely wiser, dragged into a gloriously grubby attempt to break into the adult film industry. Underneath the sleaze and scams sits a savage portrait of people trapped by nostalgia, ego and the lies they tell themselves.

Begbie becomes genuinely frightening here, less cartoon psychopath, more walking human grenade. Meanwhile Sick Boy reaches peak reptilian charisma (I have to confess to a man crush on him!).

The book also quietly predicts influencer culture, fame addiction and performative identity years before social media was even a big thing.

Darkmatters T2 film review: https://darkmatt.blogspot.com/2025/02/irvine-welsh-on-screen.html

2. Men in Love — ★★★★★

The unexpected masterpiece.

Where the earlier books often run on speed, rage and chemical desperation, Men in Love is surprisingly tender beneath all the sex, violence and self-destruction. Welsh digs into relationships, vulnerability and the terrifying possibility that these idiots might actually want happiness.

It’s still riotously funny and filthy — obviously — but there’s a melancholy maturity running through it that gives the characters unexpected emotional weight. Renton gets a bit sidelined but that allows Sick Boy to be the star of the show as he gets married!!

Spud, who just can’t catch a break, emerges as the bruised moral heart of the whole rotten enterprise and Begbie is the hand grenade of a Best Man!?

1. Trainspotting — ★★★★★

Still untouchable. Choose life…

Not just the best book in the series but one of the great British novels full stop.

Raw, hilarious, fragmented and horrifying, Trainspotting hits like a pint glass to the face. Welsh captures addiction, poverty, male friendship and urban decay with a voice so authentic it practically sweats cigarette smoke off the page.

The genius is in the contradictions: it’s disgustingly funny one moment, emotionally annihilating the next. Beneath the swagger and chaos lies a howl of rage at a generation abandoned by politics, purpose and opportunity.

And whilst Begbie remains one of fiction’s greatest nightmare creations: a pub psycho lurking somewhere between folk horror and social realism. All the cast get decent engagement, in a way that’s deeper than the film…

Speaking of the excellent film - my review: https://darkmatt.blogspot.com/2025/02/irvine-welsh-on-screen.html

>>> Imagine a world where the earth is becoming hell? One man with powers and his robot sidekick might be our only hope...

Click banner below to hear a FREE 5 mins sample of my audiobook which is becoming a graphic novel too)...

The Sequel review and Lucas Closs interview...

2026-04-26T15:00:00.001+01:00

THE SEQUEL REVIEW

Matt Adcock (@Cleric20)

Darkmatters Review: The Sequel

Lucas Closs’ The Sequel, under the assured direction of Imy Wyatt Corner, is one of those deceptively playful pieces that lures you in with wit and literary in-jokes before quietly tightening the screws. What begins as a sharp comedy-drama about authorship and ego mutates, almost imperceptibly, into something far stranger, a sly folk horror about the consequences of storytelling itself.

Grace “G.T.” Thoth returns to the village that made her famous, only to find it preserved like a shrine to her younger self. The café where she once wrote is now a museum. The people she immortalised? Fossilised into the versions she created. And the ones she didn’t include… well, they haven’t forgotten.

Closs’ writing is deliciously sharp, acidic, funny, and laced with a creeping dread that builds line by line.

The cast are excellent across the board, fully inhabiting that uneasy tonal tightrope between comedy and quiet menace. Grace is played with a brittle, unraveling intelligence, while John, the “gardening poet” turned tour guide is both tragic and faintly grotesque, clinging to relevance like a man already written out of his own life. Martha, meanwhile, brings a simmering resentment that feels like it could ignite the whole piece at any moment.

And then there’s that folk horror edge, the little figurines made of the characters add to the uncanny vibe, it’s never overstated, but always present. The village feels off. Ritualised. As if it has agreed, collectively, to remain exactly as it was… forever. Nostalgia becomes a trap. Memory becomes doctrine. And the past refuses to stay past.

A live score threads through it all, adding an almost dreamlike texture, like the play itself is remembering something incorrectly, or rewriting itself as you watch.

What The Sequel ultimately understands, brilliantly, is that storytelling is an act of power. To include is to immortalise. To exclude is to erase.

This is smart, funny, unsettling theatre with a wicked sting in its tail. Recommended!!

Out of a potential 5, you have to go with a Darkmatters:

ööööö

(5 - a sharp, strange, quietly haunting yet fun piece that proves some stories don’t want a sequel… they want revenge.)

More info and interview...

The Sequel is a new comedy-drama from emerging writer Lucas Closs that explores what happens when a novelist returns to the place she used as source material for her wildly successful novel, discovering herself both worshipped and cursed by the residents. The Sequel examines the impact of storytelling on real lives as characters are trapped by their own portrayals.

The production will be directed by Imy Wyatt Corner, who won a Fringe First in 2023 for her production of Mandi Chivasa’s BEASTS and the Charlie Harthill Award for her production of Maatin’s Duck. The Sequel follows the journey of novelist Grace “G.T.” Thoth, as she revisits the café where she wrote her first book, reconnecting with John, the person on whom she based the character of her iconic mentor. The production will feature a live musical score, adding texture and presence to the storytelling.

G.T’s coming-of-age book established her reputation as a distinctive literary voice and made the village she grew up in a destination for tourists. In the years since it was published, the café has become a small museum dedicated to her work, preserved by John- famed as the gardening poet of her novel but now a weathered tour guide. G.T is confronted with the impact her work has had on the area and its residents, as well as Martha, the cafe museum’s current owner, who resents the author for not putting her mum in the book.

‘Whatever you mentioned just became more of itself, whatever you left out, died.’

Meanwhile, John attempts to inspire Grace to write something new to revive interest in the area - and thereby bolster his livelihood.

Set within a rural community reshaped by literary notoriety and tourism, The Sequel explores authorship, ego and responsibility with dark humour. The play captures the pull of nostalgia, the desire to preserve a place exactly as it was and the compulsion to record and shape our experience into narrative. It also reveals the complications that arise when real lives become ‘material’; at the heart of the play lies the question of our relationship to others and the moral questions that arise when they become resources in our own creative progress. Directed by Imy Wyatt Corner and produced by Ella Dale, The Sequel marks Lucas Closs as an emerging writer to watch.

Listings information:
Venue: Kings Head Theatre, N1 1QP, London

Run: 20th April - 2nd May (Not Fridays) 9pm except Saturdays 8pm, Sundays at 4pm.

Running time: 75 mins no interval
Age guidance: 14+

Tickets from £18.50
https://kingsheadtheatre.com/

Lucas 'Mr Sequel'

I had the chance to ask the writer Lucas some questions…

Matt:The play deals with nostalgia and preserving the past. Why do you think people are so drawn to revisiting places connected to stories?

Lucas: I think it’s to have a kind of immersive experience. To be in the story we feel a connection to and to fill in the gaps. This is the setting of the play- a cafe preserved in a novelist’s description of itself to attract the public and to honour the shared story it featured in. The novelist (played by Nisha Emich) returns here for nostalgia but instead faces the consequences of her recording. There is always a gulf between our expectations of these kinds of places and the reality that prevents the immersion we had hoped for.

Matt:The Sequel seems fascinated by the fallout of storytelling the way writing about a place can immortalise it but also distort it. What sparked the idea of exploring the “collateral damage” of a successful novel?

Lucas: I am particularly interested in the collateral damage of an inspiring life-story. We often hear inspiring stories of people’s backgrounds in public life- Grace’s novel is basically a memoir of her adolescence. I’m interested in where this places the character John (played by Jim Findley) who hasn’t left the remote area that Grace ‘rose out’ from, or the cafe manager, Martha, (played by Julia Pilkington) who’s recently returned to work there. Michael Sandel’s ‘The Tyranny of Merit’ thinks about the insults that can be implicit in these kinds of inspiring stories. Both the residents have a combination of worship and resentment towards Grace.

Matt:Grace returning to the café that inspired her book feels almost like a ghost returning to haunt the living. Did you see this play partly as a kind of literary haunting?

Lucas: That’s very interesting. I think for Grace it’s the other way round- she is ‘the living’ and everyone there are ‘ghosts’. I did have a Christmas Carol in mind with Grace as Scrooge confronting the unknown consequences of her past… maybe if I set it at Christmas, it could become a Christmas play performed annually across the nation!

Matt:One of the most striking ideas in the play is that people can become trapped by the way they’ve been written. Do you think that’s something that happens in real life that once someone tells a story about us, it can start to define who we are?

Lucas: I’m interested in how others see us can powerfully determine how we see ourselves- particularly in a digital media landscape.

The success of Grace’s novel means Grace’s perception of the residents becomes the public perception; I think this sort of power is quite daunting.

Matt:Writers writing about writers can sometimes become a hall of mirrors. What did writing Grace teach you about your own relationship with storytelling?

Lucas: I am interested more in how the relationship between how a writer takes material from their surroundings is not far off from how we can sometimes subtly extract from or neglect what’s around us for the sake of a story we’re attached to, rather than existing alongside what’s in front of us.

Matt:The play seems to explore how communities can become frozen in the mythology of a story. Do you think nostalgia is a creative force or a dangerous one?

Lucas: Nostalgia is a sort of lazy act of creation. Though many creative things come out of it, it can be dangerous when we chose it over making something new. The play looks at the consequences of this lethargy of creativity, particularly in John’s insistence at playing classic 80s songs.

Matt:John sounds like a fascinating character a man turned into a kind of literary relic by someone else’s book. Was he inspired by a particular archetype or real figure?

Lucas: Characters for me are always composites of lots of people- I was very entertained by learning about the hustle from the real George Jung (played by Johnny Depp) , Jordan Belford (Leonardo De Caprio) and Kenny Kramer (Michael Richards) following their depictions in Blow, The Wolf of Wallstreet and Seinfeld respectively, each using their depictions in these works for their own personal enterprises.

Matt:The Sequel is a deceptively simple title. Is the play about the sequel to a novel, the sequel to a life, or the sequel to a mistake?

Lucas: I like the idea that the play you will see is the theatrical version of Grace’s new novel which is about her life and the mistake of her debut. The live score from Deniz Dortok emphasises that what you’re seeing is dramatised and expresses the sense of cinema in which characters view their own lives.

Matt:If someone turned your life into a novel, what genre would it be and how would it end?

Lucas: It would be a Children’s Book where I become king as I realise everything that rhymes becomes true.

Matt: When audiences leave the theatre, what do you hope stays with them?

Lucas: The power of the stories we tell and the impact they have on reality.

The Sequel comes to Kings Head Theatre, London on Monday 20th April - Saturday 2nd May 2026. For more information visit: https://kingsheadtheatre.com/whats-on/the-sequel-5tbn

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Harsh Language – Time Won’t Wait For You review and interview

2026-04-22T16:02:00.002+01:00

Harsh Language – Time Won’t Wait For You (HarshLanguageBand)

Reviewed by Matt Adcock (@Cleric20)

There’s a particular kind of album that it seeps in to your life, like something already in your bloodstream finally making itself known and engages your inner pleasure centre in a vice grip.

Time Won’t Wait For You from Harsh Language, is exactly that kind of record. Two years in the making, it’s emotionally wired to themes of mental health, fractured trust and the slow realisation that the people who promised to protect you… probably won’t, this is a controlled detonation of emotion - and it ROCKS.

Sonically, the band operate in that beautifully unstable space between shimmer and alt-rock weight. Guitars don’t so much riff as hover, thick with distortion and intent, while synths flicker underneath like faulty circuitry. There are echoes, think Deftones’ bruised atmospherics, Placebo’s emotional bite, a hint of Depeche Mode if you ran it through a blown speaker at 2am, but Harsh Language aren’t pastiche merchants. They’re building something messier. Something that breathes.

The early single “To Nothing” is the blueprint: bright, almost euphoric electronic energy colliding with a wall of guitar and a lyrical undercurrent that suggests everything is quietly falling apart. That tension between uplift and collapse is where the album lives. It’s what gives the record its pulse.

“One Punch Man” closes with some of the best dialogue from Aliens- which is the inspiration not just for this band but my heist thriller novel coming soon too!? (Find out more here)…

This isn’t nihilistic music. That would be too easy. Instead, it carries what the band have called a “melancholy optimist” core, the sense that hope is still there, stubbornly flickering… even as reality keeps proving it misplaced. Love appears, but it doesn’t stabilise. Healing is suggested, but never quite arrives. Time, as the title makes brutally clear, isn’t on your side…it’s actively taking things from you.

What elevates Time Won’t Wait For You is how deliberately unpolished it feels. Recorded and mixed by the band, with drums tracked at Bush Studios and mastering from Philip Marsden, the album resists the over-sanitised sheen of modern production. It’s not lo-fi per-se but it’s not pristine either, you can hear the edges, the choices, the human fingerprints all over it.

This isn’t an album trying to soundtrack your best life. It’s the one you reach for when things aren’t working, when things are real, when the night stretches out a bit too long and your thoughts get louder than they should.

Time Won’t Wait For You is excellent, one that will stay with you and bodes well for future Harsh Language!!

Out of a potential 5, you have to go with a Darkmatters:

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(5 - a melancholy-optimist-electro-em-up that hits like pulse rifle.)

I had the chance to put some questions to the band - here's what they had to say:

Matt: There’s this fascinating tension between textures and heavier alt-rock weight, who are the artists (or even non-musical influences) that helped you find that balance?

Sean: 65daysofstatic has always been a big influence - in one of my old bands we saw them do a Radio 1 session at Maida Vale and it was a bit of an epiphany - I'd had these ideas for ages about blending the styles but no idea on how to actually pull it off and that was an eye opener. NIN and acts like MaybeSheWill, HEALTH and Scaler have also been a steady 'guide' for want of a better word. Over time, the balance has evolved and we're pretty happy with the mix - and also more than happy to extract the more electro elements or focus on them where it feels appropriate.

Rob: Sean's inception of the band was heavily influenced by artists that represent those two contrasting textures. It continues to influence our writing because of the freedom and value those contrasting soundscapes offer an audience. Personally, I take ownership over the low end and spend a lot of time considering how that can create tension, release and moments that capture the attention of the listener.

Alec: That's been Sean's goal from the start and it's something we continue to develop and hone as we write more. Sean used to mention the band 65daysofstatic a lot when we first got together and I remember listening to their first album and having that lightbulb moment of 'Oh cool, I get it.' Of course they're a lot proggier than we are, but the ideas are there of blending melodic synth with something heavier and a bit more in your face. We like the 'wall of noise' guitars you find in shoegaze and hardcore bands from the 90s. We're also a bunch of nerds so the playful nature of math rock appeals to us, so ultimately we're influenced by a lot of different sounds and operating within them mostly, sometimes separately and sometimes all at once.

Matt: The album circles mental health, love, and disappointment in people who were meant to protect you, was it important to keep those themes ambiguous, or are they rooted in very specific experiences?

Sean: They're mostly ambiguous, taken from a mix of collected experiences over the years or imagined scenarios based on those - I don't often tend to write specifics unless I want to tell a certain story, I like being indirect and I like people making their own conclusions from what they hear and relating it to their own stories.

Rob: These topics are present in our collective lives, as well as in the public consciousness atr the moment. It feels natural that these themes leak into our writing too. I wrote the lyrics to Helium Heart as a way of expressing myself following a close friend taking their own life. The line 'This isn't finding god, this is running away' was a deliberately barbed since I wanted to find a way to express my anger at their actions through the grief and sadness I was feeling. The rest is a more deliberately ambiguous exploration of my feelings at that time. I like the think that the listener might not necessarily read the subject matter of the song right away.

Alec: I'll let Sean and Rob answer that one but as someone that joined the band as bit later, I found the ambiguity of the lyrics and themes actually resonated with me personally. In the ambiguity there is specificty as people will relate the ideas to their own experience.

Matt: You’ve used the phrase “melancholy optimist” do you see that as a survival mechanism or a worldview or both?

Sean: Definitely both. I'm someone who hopes for the best but is prepared for the worst. Like many people, I've been let down and also let people down, but I'm a lot more positive these days and able to learn from that. It's also difficult to know what's going on with the world right now, but importantly I think most people are decent and just want to let people live and not be a shit to each other, and as long as we have that I think there's always a chance that it will work out - It's hard to see that when you're stuck on social media, but I want to believe it!

Alec: For me, this phrasing matches my own worldview in that I do think everything is a bit rubbish currently, but I know that things only get better after they've been bad. Everything will be alright in the end and if it isn't alright then it's not the end.

Matt: There’s a sense across the album that time isn’t neutral, it’s actively taking things from you. Was that a conscious theme from the start, or something that emerged as you wrote?

Sean: It's a bit of both, as time goes on that's definitely become a focus in my life - to make the most of my life and the people I love as we don't know how long we have here. So I know that mindset was present at the start of writing, as the lyric that the album's named after comes from imperial.bedrooms, which was one of the first songs I ever wrote under the Harsh Language banner! But it also it wasn't a conscious thought to actively put that into the writing of the album overall, it just evolved that way - and I imagine it will continue to be a common topic.

Rob: Ageing, entropy and our own failings in life come into sharper focus as we age I think. Seeing idols age, loved ones pass away, tragedy in the world, all contribute to the feeling that the safety and security of youth are somehow being 'taken' from us as we age and move chronologically further away. I suppose it's another example of ideas from our non-creative lives entering our writing by way of osmosis. Perhaps it would be less emotionally arduous to write about driving fast cars or partying hard...

Matt: “To Nothing” feels like a mission statement, was it always the obvious single, or did it reveal itself to you later?

Sean: Later really. 'To Nothing was an interesting one - I'd written this synth part ages ago and it was a completely different, much slower minute of a song. One day I just thought to try a different beat on it, and the song transformed into what it is now in pretty much an afternoon. Same with the lyrics and the vocals, it was one of those songs that went from limbo to something we were happy with really quickly. But it wasn't until we heard the full album together that it felt like something new and different and thought "that's our first single".

Rob: To Nothing was interesting because it's one of the entirely new songs on the album. It was also composed and put together in a new way for us. For example I heard the vocal melodies and lyrics for the first time when we tracked the vocals in the studio. Whilst composing and tracking the bass parts I certainly wasn't considering To Nothing to be the first single from the album. It didn't reveal itself until after Sean had mixed it and we realised we liked how different it was from the singles we've put out in the past. The 80's, electro influences were exciting to put out there as a representation of us.

Alec: It definitely revealed itself after the fact but it's a single born out of us really starting to get to grips with what we're trying to do and how we write / play together. Not to mention it's fully electronic, so you'll only hear my drums when we do it live. We're really happy with the blend of pop hooks and melodic samples coupled with chunky guitars and noise.

I think calling it a 'mission statement' is spot on for the future of the band. It feels like the culmination of a long process of meeting the guys, figuring out how we work together, learning the tracks Sean already had and writing new stuff. It's a single that closes a chapter and starts the next one, demonstrating what we want to achieve next.

Matt: Are there any tracks on the album that were particularly difficult to finish, either technically or emotionally?

Sean: Technically, 'Melancholia' - that was so early in the mixing process (and learning to mix) that I wanted it to set the standard really early. And every time I'd start mixing something else, I'd learn a bit more and come back and try new techniques. I dread to think how many different mix variants of that song there are...

Emotionally, it was 'What we Make'. I wrote those lyrics after I'd had a nothing argument with my wife and I went to take a walk. I found myself in the corner of this pub with headphones and just thinking about why that happened, what was really going on in my head and realising the worries I was going through that I hadn't taken any time to really process, and I just started thinking about what a positive effect my wife has had on my life. And so I really wanted to take the time to make that song really lyrically important, about steering away from negative space and taking action to make a positive change in yourself.

Rob: Helium Heart is a personal commentary on my own emotional reaction to finding out my friend Jasper took his own life. We made the decision that Sean would sing the verses, having been written a more ambiguous, opaque tone and I would sing the choruses, which are written in more direct, emotive language. I find myself being aware of those feelings of sadness and anger whenever I step up to sing those lyrics. To Nothing also has quite a busy bass part that is a bit of a work out live.

Alec: Sean would probably say Melancholia from a technical stand point. That was the one he worked tirelessly on to make sure it was the benchmark for the rest of the album.

For myself, theresalwaysabiggerinterlude was probably the biggest challenge with its constantly changing structure and odd time signatures.

Matt: Conversely, was there a moment where something just clicked, a song that came together almost too easily?

Sean: To Nothing and Helium Heart came together really quickly once the framework was there, but I often don't trust it if something comes together too quickly!

Rob: Helium Heart, again. I presented a very basic, scruffy version of the song to Sean and it almost seemed to will itself into existence. The heavy chugging guitar riff was an early idea of Sean's and I just loved it instantly. The song seemed to fall into place for me. It was previously a bit longer and we decided to cut it down and even that happened easily, we were all in agreement right away. I wish they were all like that!

Alec: Ironically, theresalwaysabiggerinterlude worked pretty much right away for us. It's a reworking of one of Sean's earlier tracks called 'Interlude to Nothing' so we had that rehearsed already. I spent some time figuring out the drum part and how it would fit into the new structure, but with enough practice it came together in the rehearsal room pretty swiftly.

Matt: Recording yourselves gives you total control but also no safety net. Did that freedom ever become overwhelming?

Sean: For me, often it did - it was a big part of why it took so long for me to mix it. Trying to balance work and life stresses with the stress of making the mix work better - and learning how to become better at mixing - did mean that sometimes I just wasn't dedicating enough time to it. Now we're out the other side and it's all done though, it was really satisfying so I can see me doing it again in the future - just maybe not a whole album next time!

Rob: Personally, I felt the opposite. Many of the songs were re-records of songs Sean had written earlier. It was just a matter of getting them to a place where they reflect how we play them live. I didn't ever have a sense of 'freedom' rather than a sense that it was necessary to record in this way due to budget and time constraints. More recently we recorded in a more traditional way, in a studio with a producer and I felt far more free and able to express myself musically.

Alec: Agree with Rob there! Time constraints (we all work, I'm a Dad etc) and budget contraints meant there was a lot of pressure to get the drums right when recording and do it quickly. Whereas in the studio (for songs we haven't released yet) there was much more focus on creative exploration.

Matt: How do you translate something so layered and textural into a live setting?

Sean: It's taken a while to find the balance - often you are at the mercy of venue limitations at our level, so there's been a bit of compromise in our expectations of how 'clear' everything will be. That said, you want it to be a bit different live too anyway. We took some time to work out the simplest, most reliable way of playing the backing tracks live and - while I can see it evolving - we've got a bulletproof system right now with the laptop sending a click and samples to our own in-ear headphones as well as the samples to the live desk. Sound engineers are usually pretty happy to see we've got our shit together on that side!

Rob: We really do spend time thinking about how things will translate live, how can we give an audience member the best 'value' show we can. Sean came up with an ingenious method of utilising ableton software to allow us to bring a lot of the texture to our live show without compromising on the 'live' elements, the guitars, bass, drums and vocals of a traditional rock band. We use our own personal in ear monitoring to hear the metronome and tracks whilst also making us of the FOH monitors for the rest. Some of the live experience can be lost when a band is playing with a metronome live and we work hard to ensure that doesn't happen.

Alec: For the most part we try to make sure that the tracks don't lose their impact when played live, which means we rework some of them slightly to hit just as hard when played live. To Nothing, for instance, is heavier live. We still have the synth and samples coming through, but I play heavier and louder and Sean's guitar is sharper and crunchier, trying to reach that 'wall of noise' vibe we like so much.

We throw in extra bits, extend sections and sometimes just jam a bit more live. We want the people that come to see us to be gripped!

Matt: What’s your favourite swear word… and what makes it elite tier? * Language Advisory :) *

Sean: Fuck' is the most common, but it has to be 'C**t' really doesn't it? The C is so aggressive at the start, and you can really spit it out which, if the situation has warranted the use of throwing 'cunt' out there, you're probably going to. I like getting creative though with swearing though - 'Fuckmanaut' and 'vapid bag of pig dicks' are ones I've thrown out in the past. It contradicts the c bomb theory but there's also something really satisfying about adding something with multiple syllables after 'Fuck', like 'you fucking sack of c**t'.

Rob: Vittu. I am a Finnish speaker and it is the Finnish word for fuck. Great for when you stub your toe or get cut up in traffic.

Alec: Is there anything better than a really well placed 'c**t'. Horrible word but it packs a punch.

Matt: And in the spirit of the band name, what’s the most satisfying piece of “harsh language” ever committed to song?

Sean: Nazi Punks Fuck Off' by Dead Kennedys, for obvious reasons.

Rob: The Manic Street Preachers have a song called Me and Stephen Hawking and it has a line in it that goes "Oh the joy, me and Stephen Hawking, we laugh. We missed the sex revolution, when we failed the physical". It's not Harsh in a sweary sense but it's a hell of a picture.

Alec: This is not the greatest use of harsh language in a song, but it's one of my favourites. Dry Cleaning's 'Goodnight' features the lyric 'Don't touch me, you stole my childhood CDs you fuck'. Delivered by Florence Shaw with wonderfully British bite.

Matt: Has anyone ever told you to tone the name down, or is that kind of the point?

Sean: No not really, but even if they did we wouldn't. All band names are bullshit anyway!

Matt: Gun to your head: Hudson, Hicks, Ripley or Vasquez / who are you in a crisis?

Sean: My head says Hicks - supportive, analytical but controlled. But the reality is probably closer to Hudson...panicky, frustrated and loud but then snapping out of it and locking in...

Alec: Yep like Sean says, would love to think I'm Ripley or Hicks but I'm probably Hudson.

Matt: If Time Won’t Wait For You had to include one more Aliens quote, which one would it be and where would you drop it?

Sean: I often say "they mostly come at night. Mostly". But it's probably Ripley saying "You know Burke, I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other for a goddamn percentage". It's probably why that film is timeless. Even several hundred years in the future, people can and still will be arseholes to each other. I think it would go over the instrumental bit in the middle of imperial.bedrooms quite nicel (just after the guitar harmonics).

Rob: I thought Sigourney delivered the line "Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?" Perhaps that line cut directly from the film would slot in nicely after 'theresalwaysabiggerinterlude'.

Alec: Ah see this is where I get all high and mighty and state that I prefer Alien over Aliens!

Would love to put in the line 'I can't lie to you about your chances, but you have my sympathies' from Alien.

Otherwise it's 'GAME OVER MAN' from Aliens.

Matt: Describe the album using only three words.

Sean: Optimistic. Realistic. Complete

Rob: abour of love

Alec: Melodic. Noisy. Riffs.

Matt: What’s the most “Harsh Language” thing that’s happened to you as a band so far?

Sean: Rob likes telling this story - on the day of the Platinum Jubilee we did a photo shoot in Hackney Wick by the river. We'd had a few drinks, and a few more, and then frankly too much. I can't remember this but apparently I carried a tray of drinks out to the outside tables and, in front of everyone, stacked it beautifully from the bottom of the stairs - flying head first into a guys crotch, like an olympic diver. Not my finest hour but hilarious for everyone who witnessed it. To be honest the name suggests a much crassy, punkier vibe than the geeky, introverted neuro-spicy reality of us!

Rob: We were playing a gig in Hackney once, supporting our friends Saxophone (band) and there was a nice crowd there who weren't dancing quite as much as I'd have wanted them to. I remember shouting at them during our song Imperial Bedrooms to "DANCE C**TS!" which really didn't go down too well. We were in the little green room behind the stage afterwards and Alec just said "I think it would be good if we don't call the crowd c**ts again". I have thus far honoured my promise to him.

Alec: Sean and Rob being called Ant and Dec by some heckler at our first ever gig... No disrespect to Ant & Dec but that was pretty harsh. They handled it brilliantly though, pretty sure an in-unison 'fuck you' was uttered.

Matt: QUICKFIRE ROUND (ONE-WORD / NO THINKING)

Sean: Rob: Alec:

Loud or quiet?	Loud	Quiet	Loud
Analogue or digital?	Analogue	Analogue	Analogue
Hope or honesty?	Hope	Honesty	Honesty
Control or chaos?	Control	Control	Control
Rock or Pop?	Rock	Rock	Rock
Stay or go?	Go	GO!	Go

FIND OUT MORE AND BUY HARSH LANGUAGE STUFF HERE:

Bandcamp: https://harshlanguage.bandcamp.com/

Website: https://linktr.ee/harshlanguageband

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Matt gets Vicious with cursed box movies

2026-03-02T16:13:00.002+00:00

Darkmatters Presents: Top Cursed-Box Movies…

Boxes in horror are irresistible traps, part temptation, part test, part cosmic prank. From brass puzzles that summon demons to strange objects whispering for blood, here’s the Darkmatters Top Cursed-Box Films...

The Box (2009)

Press to kill, collect a cool million.

Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko) takes Richard Matheson’s short story and runs it through a paranoid filter of suburban dread and cosmic punishment. A couple (Cameron Diaz, James Marsden) face a moral dilemma: press the button, kill a stranger, win a fortune. Simple? Not remotely.

It spirals into eerie sci-fi and moral horror. Half Twilight Zone, half government by

Darkmatters verdict: The oddball, freak-out member of the cursed-box family, grotesque and unforgettable.

Rating: ★ ★ ★

The Special (2020)

Pleasure, obsession, and a box with consequences.

Jerry suspects his wife’s cheating, so his mate suggests a night with “The Special.” At a secret brothel, Jerry meets… a box. And whatever’s inside, it changes him in body, mind, soul, and not in a good way.

This low-budget freak-out from B. Harrison Smith is a sleazy, Cronenbergian descent into addiction and flesh-based horror. Both grotesque and grimly funny, it’s the weird cousin of Hellraiser that never got invited to family dinner.

“Every pleasure has its price.”

Darkmatters verdict: The oddball, freak-out member of the cursed-box family — grotesque, unforgettable.

Rating: ★ ★ ★½

The Possession (2012)

The dybbuk box bites back.

A haunted antique bought at a yard sale brings demonic chaos to a fractured family. Based on real-world Jewish folklore, Ole Bornedal’s slick chiller uses the “dybbuk box” myth to explore faith, responsibility, and the things we pass down without understanding.

“This is what you invite when curiosity outweighs fear.”

Darkmatters verdict: A spooky morality tale with real theological texture.

Rating: ★★★½

Hellraiser (1987)

The Lament Configuration is the apex predator of puzzle boxes.

Clive Barker’s masterpiece doesn’t just contain horror; it engineers it. The ornate brass cube promises “ultimate pleasure” but delivers exquisite suffering. Open it, and the Cenobites come part angelic, part demonic, all disturbingly polite about your dismemberment.

It’s the alpha predator of cursed objects: elegant, intelligent, and fatally curious. No film before or since has better captured the allure of forbidden knowledge wrapped in geometry and blood.

“You opened the box. We came.”

Darkmatters verdict: The gold standard, a dark sermon on desire and damnation.

Rating: ★★★★★

>>> Imagine a world where the earth is becoming hell? One man with powers and his robot sidekick might be our only hope...

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The K: or the hum beneath the (reflecting) skin

2026-02-27T12:09:00.001+00:00

The K: or the hum beneath the (reflecting) skin

By Dawn Merriman

Reviewed by Matt (cleric20) Adcock

Reading The K by Dawn Merriman feels less like consuming a thriller and more like being slowly enrolled into one. Do I fear for my sanity after reading it? Absolutely (but then if you know me, you’ll know that’s probably not a new sensation!?)…

Readers get to observe young Jeremiah, who's not exactly normal... and before I realised it, I was uncomfortably adjacent to him. By the final act, I was beginning to understand his internal logic. My lawyer says I have to put ‘not agreeing or endorsing’ in here, but I definitely recognised the terrifying smoothness of it.

Merriman (who must be fun to have a glass of wine or two with) doesn’t bludgeon you with depravity. She gives you a rationalisation. The small permissions. The interior voice sounds disturbingly calm. Evil here isn’t theatrical; it’s more administrative. It kinda explains itself.

There’s a tonal lineage running through the book, I picked up a flicker of Dexter without the winking charm, a touch of American Psycho without the satire, maybe even a trace of Blue (saw this on the big screen last week and it’s still ace), Velvet’s suburban rot but in a stripped form. Here is moral decay under flat Midwestern skies, speaking of film references, if you like The K, then you should check the lesser-known classic The Reflecting Skin (a lesser-seen 1995 cult classic).

But back to The K, this is a master-class in restraint, and that makes it hit harder.

One of the many things that lingered with me is how the book weaponises intimacy. You don’t fear Jeremiah because he’s monstrous. You fear him because he’s coherent. Because you can track the steps. Because the slope is so rational, it almost feels reasonable. *shudder*

Then comes the love story, and it’s here that The K gets crueller.

Victoria isn’t a redemption arc. She’s friction. She introduces hesitation into inevitability. And as a reader, you find yourself wanting, absurdly, for love to matter.

What Merriman explores through her quietly relentless prose (which put me in mind of the masterful Catriona Ward), is the idea that love doesn’t erase darkness. At best, it complicates it. At worst, it becomes a kind of ‘possession’.

This thematic tension is what gives the novel its aftertaste; it’s bitter because this isn’t a “can he be saved?” It’s more a “why do we need him to be?” tale.

The prose itself is cool, controlled, just my twisted cup of tea. This unpacking of a psychological descent made me feel like I was watching corrosion spread across metal in real time. Perhaps the corrosion is in my mind now after reading this?

Thanks Dawn…

As the Sisters of Mercy so eloquently sang, ‘hey now, hey now now – sing this corrosion to me..’.

When I finished the book, I closed it slowly. And sat with the hum in my head.

The K isn’t interested in shock value, although it is shocking. Dawn is more interested, I think, in complicity. You get a dip into the very mind of a monster and asked, “How comfortable are we watching?”

And that sure is unsettling, but I highly recommend you take this trip…

Dawn Merriman

she looks so normal too...

Dawn Merriman writes creepy small-town murder mysteries from her small farm in northeast Indiana, where she lives with her husband and teenage children. You can often find her with muck boots on her feet and a story in her head. She enjoys animals, auctions, snorkeling and archaeology.

Dawn Merriman grew up a small-town farm girl on a small-time pig farm in Indiana. She spent her young adulthood sitting on her bedroom floor scribbling stories in notebooks. She won the "Northeast Indiana Young Writers" award as a sophomore in high school.

After battling severe depression, she wrote her debut novel, "How Murder Saved My Life" as therapy, mixing her love of murder mysteries and farming with climbing out of the darkness of illness.

Out of a potential 5, you have to go with a Darkmatters:

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(5 - Step this way for some excellently dark, unsettling psychological suspense.)

Find out more about Dawn here

Buy The K here

Read what others are saying about The K here

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Hell On Wheels: The Car vs The Car: Road to Revenge

2026-02-11T11:39:00.005+00:00

The Car (1977) vs The Car: Road to Revenge (2019)

M.O.T. carried out by Matt Adcock (@Cleric20)

Sometimes at Darkmatters we ask the important question:

What if the villain… was a car?

Not a metaphorical car.

Not a car representing capitalism, patriarchy or Tottenham’s away form.

Just… a car.

And thus we have two gloriously daft, unexpectedly effective entries in the “vehicular malevolence” subgenre.

The Car

Directed by: Elliot Silverstein

A mysterious matte-black Lincoln Continental begins terrorising a small Utah desert town, running down cyclists, smashing through parades, and generally behaving like Jaws if Spielberg had swapped the shark for a two-ton demon sedan.

Sheriff Wade Parent (James Brolin) tries to stop it. The car has no driver. No motive. No brakes. No soul.

It is never explained. Which is precisely why it works.

It’s basically Jaws on land.

The town. The mounting dread. The sense of something unstoppable lurking just off-screen.

The car itself is shot like a monster — low angles, engine growls, POV shots bearing down on screaming victims. There’s no winking irony. The film commits. Fully. Which makes the absurd premise weirdly effective.

Delightfully blunt dialogue

When asked what it is, one character replies:

“Maybe it’s the Devil.”

No committee meeting. No exposition dump. Just — yeah. Sure. Devil car. Move along.

There’s also the dry Sheriff line:

“That car’s got a driver.”

“Who?”

“The Devil.”

Strengths

• Minimal explanation = maximal menace

• Incredible stunt work (pre-CGI, real cars, real danger)

• Deadpan ‘70s seriousness elevates the silliness

• Desert cinematography gives it mythic weight

Weaknesses

• Third act drags slightly

• Some performances are wooden enough to qualify as roadside fencing

Out of a potential 5, you have to go with a Darkmatters:

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(3 - Lean, mean, and enjoyably ridiculous. Not the classic I was hoping for but absolutely a cult petrol-fume delight..)

My Letterboxd review

Car: Road to Revenge

Directed by: G.J. Echternkamp

A district attorney is murdered and fused with his experimental self-driving car in a neon-soaked dystopian future city. The car returns as a sentient revenge machine, slaughtering the gangsters who killed him. But after getting trashed the car is rebuilt with bit of the original killer car... more mayhem ensues...

Yes. It’s basically Christine by way of low-rent Blade Runner or Johnny Mnemonic.

And it’s greater than it has any right to be!?

Where the original was sun-bleached horror, this is cyberpunk B-movie chaos. Holograms. Corporate corruption. Self-driving AI. Revenge-em-up. Neon reflections on wet asphalt. Bastardised monster car made from parts of BOTH the original and the new one: nice! Cameo from Ronny ‘Robobcop’ Cox from the original film: win!!

It knowingly leans into its B-movie DNA, and that self-awareness gives it, for me, an edge the original didn’t quite have.

Thematically, it’s riffing on tech horror what if your autonomous vehicle decides you deserve judgment?

It has more plot, more lore, more silliness and is more fun.

At one point a character growls:

“You think you can outrun this car?”

Which, frankly, is cinema at its most efficient.

There’s also some wonderfully straight-faced tech babble about AI consciousness that feels like someone dared the script to say “revenge protocol” without laughing.

Strengths

• Cyberpunk aesthetic is surprisingly strong for a low-budget sequel

• Embraces its absurdity

• Revenge structure keeps momentum high

• Fun nods to possessed-car lore… very much in the shadow of Christine (which, yes, still reigns supreme in vehicular horror)

Weaknesses

• Acting occasionally wobbles

• Budget shows in some VFX

Out of a potential 5, you have to go with a Darkmatters:

ööö1/2

(3.5 - It shouldn’t work. Yet it kind of does.
And the cyberpunk twist gives it just enough personality to edge out its predecessor...)

My Letterboxd review

Magnum wasn't loving having to trade in his Ferrari...

Final Thoughts: Devil vs Digital Demon

The Car (1977) plays it straight and becomes unintentionally funny, which paradoxically makes it creepier.

The Car: Road to Revenge plays it pulpy and knowingly silly, which makes it more entertaining.

One is desert dread. One is neon nihilism.

Neither touches the holy combustion engine of Christine (please can we have cyberpunk sequel to that now??) But both deserve a spot in the late-night “cars behaving badly” marathon.

And honestly?

If your Tesla ever starts idling outside your bedroom window at 3am playing Roxette tunes…

Don’t check the app. RUN!

Darkmatters approves vehicular vengeance in moderation.

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A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Darkmatters Guide

2026-01-19T17:45:00.002+00:00

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Episode 1: “The Hedge Knight”

Darkmatters Blog Review (spoiler-tempered, fire-forged by Matt @Cleric20 Adcock)

The Game of Thrones universe has grown so vast that its edges now fold back upon themselves like wings of a great, burning wyrm, and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is the newest fractal in that mythic flame. Where its predecessors Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon barbed us with politics and dread, this prequel premieres not with an Iron Throne forged of swords but with a pair of misfits marching straight into the mud and sun of Ashford Meadow.

Episode 1, titled “The Hedge Knight,” opens on a man burying his past and tripping into his future. Ser Duncan the Tall (played with guileless gravity by Peter Claffey) is a towering figure of noble ideals in a world that treats ideals like worn coin. Fresh from the funeral of his mentor, Dunk sets off toward a tournament, not because he thirsts for glory, but because dignity feels like the last decent sword left in his scabbard.

And then there’s Egg (who looks like he's escaped from The Last Airbender) a bald, quick-witted lad who clings to Dunk’s heels like a shadow that knows too much. Their meeting is less destiny and more accident, but as with all great myths, accidents tend to be omens in disguise.

The tone is… odd but brilliant. Not whimsical exactly, Westeros remains a land where fate bites hard but unmoored from the relentless doom of its forebears. This is Game of Thrones without the siege towers, or at least with siege towers replaced by amusement-park-level absurdity: tavern mishaps, tournament pageantry, and a physical comedy cadence that gives Monty Python a polite nod from beyond the grave.

Yet beneath the lightness, there’s grit: swords clash, horses sweat, and the first seeds of legend take root in stubborn soil. Dunk is a knight because he refuses to yield his sense of right, even when life nudges him toward cynicism. Egg’s secret...hinted, not handed to you like a gaudy bauble, promises greater truths to come.

In pure Darkmatters terms: this is Westeros with its armour off, sitting around a tavern fire, eating cold beef, telling each other the same old stories about dragons and king, except this time, the jokes are crude and the humanity is all too close to the bone. It doesn’t roar like wildfire; it simmers like broth on a hearth. Some will call it slow. Some will call it small. But under its modest surface flows the deep, dark river of what it means to be more than a sword in a kingdom that despises the humble.

Series Source Material... Tales of Dunk and Egg: Darkmatters Guide

To truly taste what this show is biting into, you have to crack open the soil of the Dunk & Egg novellas, the narrative bedrock of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. These stories, set nearly a century before Game of Thrones, chronicle the unlikely, unforgettable duo: Ser Duncan the Tall and his young companion Aegon V Targaryen, known as Egg.

The Novellas (Collected as A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms)

The Hedge Knight

The root from which all this sprouted. A hedge knight is a knight in name alone — no lands, no gold, no retinue, just rusted steel and stubborn pride. Dunk shows up at a tourney with hopes bigger than his coin purse, earning laughs, bruises, and an apprentice with secrets that could shake thrones.

The Sworn Sword

After their debut, Dunk and Egg’s path takes them to the turbulent marches between mighty houses. Here honour and duty clash with politics and pride, and our duo learn that vows mean little when the powerful lust for leverage.

The Mystery Knight

A feast of intrigue and betrayal. A wedding tourney becomes the perfect gilded stage for plots both subtle and savage. Old grudges, buried secrets, and unsettling truths about nobility’s appetites come to the fore.

These novellas feel lighter than the dense tomes of A Song of Ice and Fire, but don’t mistake levity for innocence: Martin’s world still bites, bleeds, and burns. Beneath the camaraderie are searing reflections on honour, legacy, and what it costs to be decent in a world that rewards cruelty.

Where the Show Fits in the Larger Mythos

The series unfolds roughly 90–100 years before Game of Thrones... a time when the dragons are gone but their memory still haunts every spire and keep.

Dunk is poised on the threshold of knighthood, Egg harbours a royal secret, and the stakes are human before they are epic.

Future seasons are likely to adapt The Sworn Sword and The Mystery Knight, deepening both the friendship and the political undercurrents that make Westeros bleed.

If Game of Thrones was song, majestic, thunderous, and often tragic, then A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is a ballad: modest, plaintive, but rich with melody and heart.

Out of a potential 5, you have to go with a Darkmatters:

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(5 - promising and funny where you might expect grimness, and quietly poised to deeply move you.)

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Matt finds faith in The Carpenter's Son (review)

2026-01-04T12:17:00.001+00:00

The Carpenter’s Son

Dir. Lotfy Nathan

Reviewed by Matt (@Cleric20) Adcock

Holy dread

Here’s The Carpenter’s Son a film that leans hard into a deliberately unsettling act of theological imagination, one that reaches into the apocrypha, drags out a half-suppressed idea, and asks whether holiness itself might feel like horror when encountered without the cushioning of doctrine and distance.

Set during the Holy Family’s flight and exile, the film frames Joseph, Mary, and their child not as icons but as people living inside a mystery that refuses to behave. Nicolas Cage plays Joseph as a man straining under a responsibility he cannot rationalise, at once protective, bewildered, and quietly terrified. FKA twigs’s Mary is restrained and inward, a presence shaped by contemplation rather than spectacle, carrying a conviction that offers no immunity from fear.

And then there is the boy.

Played with unsettling restraint by Noah Jupe, this is not the glowing child of Christmas cards. This is a Jesus whose emerging power feels unstable; he’s not ‘Brighburn’ malevolent, but his powers are uncontained. The film draws inspiration from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a non-canonical second-century text long regarded as troubling precisely because it depicts a young Jesus performing miracles that feel abrupt, even punitive. In director Lotfy Nathan’s hands, this becomes the film’s theological fuse.

There’s a moment in The Carpenter’s Son that quietly explains the entire film.

Joseph fashions a wooden idol, an object of devotion shaped by his own hands. Later, the boy smashes it.

It’s a simple gesture, almost throwaway. But it lands like a theological hammer blow. Because idolatry, at its core, iis about trying to shape God into something manageable, something that fits our expectations, fears, and need for control. And that, more than demons or violence, is the real horror this film is circling.

The Carpenter’s Son is an unusual, often frustrating, sometimes compelling act of religious horror. This is not a film asking whether Jesus is divine. It assumes that he is. The question is far more unsettling:

What happens when divine power appears before it has learned restraint and when the people closest to it try to manage it?

Despite its apocryphal roots, The Carpenter’s Son is surprisingly orthodox in its fundamentals. The Nativity unfolds in a stable, recognisably drawn from Luke’s Gospel. Joseph receives angelic warning dreams that send the family fleeing to Egypt to escape Herod’s slaughter. Years later, Joseph doubts his own memory, but the film never implies these events are imaginary or symbolic. They are presented as real, grounding the story firmly within biblical history rather than alternative myth.

Likewise, Jesus experiences visions of his future: crucifixion, death, and resurrection. These aren’t framed as metaphors or psychological delusions. We’re invited to accept them as genuine foreknowledge. Destiny is not in question here, only how one lives while waiting for it.

This grounding matters, because it shapes the film’s approach to evil.

The Stranger (Satan) is played with earnest heart by Isla Johnston. She’s not a trickster abstraction or ironic metaphor, but a fallen spiritual being, clearly evil, clearly opposed to God, and clearly doomed. There’s no ambiguity about that and no invitation to sympathise with it.

What is interesting is its motivation.

This Satan isn’t trying to win a cosmic war. It knows how that story ends. Instead, it is driven by resentment, a desire to drag Jesus down to its own level, to infect him with the same bitterness and hatred it feels toward humanity. The goal is not domination, but corruption: to convince Jesus that people deserve punishment rather than mercy, and that power should be exercised through retribution.

There’s a faint echo of gnostic thinking in Satan’s rhetoric, talk of liberating humanity from flesh, of transcendence through rejection of the material world, but crucially, the film never endorses this. That worldview is presented as perverse, deforming, and spiritually dead. Matter is not the enemy here. Creation is not a mistake. The problem is resentment.

In that sense, Satan functions as a dark mirror, not just of what Jesus could become if he abandoned compassion, but of what humans become when they define themselves by grievance.

One of the film’s most theologically confident moves is also its biggest problem (as a horror film at least).

Whenever Jesus confronts evil spirits, he succeeds. They cannot resist him. His authority is innate and unquestioned. The danger Satan poses is not physical or existential, but moral.

This creates an intrinsic limitation on dread. We know where this story is going. We know Jesus will not fall. The film never seriously threatens the biblical arc, and because of that, Satan never quite feels like a source of catastrophic danger.

There’s a version of The Carpenter’s Son that might have generated far more terror by declaring early on that “all bets are off,” that this is a radical reimagining unconstrained by Scripture. That film would have been far more blasphemous but far more frightening.

Nathan doesn’t make that film. Instead, he chooses theological seriousness over horror maximalism. The result is a movie with moments of brutality (Roman tortures are depicted with stomach-turning cruelty) and some, mostly snake-induced, jump scares, but not enough to satisfy adrenaline junkies, and not enough sustained dread to rival slow-burn nightmares like Hereditary.

Where the film does generate genuine unease is through Joseph.

Nicolas Cage plays him as a man caught between devotion and fear, sincerity and control. Early on, he’s relatable: a father trying to protect his family, provide stability, and raise a son who frightens him precisely because he cannot fully understand him.

But as the film progresses, Joseph hardens. His faith becomes rigid. His protectiveness curdles into coercion. He tries to shape Jesus into something safe, contained, predictable, an idol rather than a mystery.

This is where the film’s most potent theme emerges. Joseph’s desire to control his son mirrors humanity’s desire to control God. When Jesus resists being shaped, Joseph responds with anger. When the idol shatters, Joseph lashes out.

The tragedy is that the film doesn’t quite give this arc enough room to breathe. We see Joseph become unpleasant, even cruel, but we don’t always feel the weight of the pressures driving him there. A version of the film told more squarely from Joseph’s perspective would have been bolder.

Instead, the narrative oscillates between Joseph’s story and Jesus’ “origin” story, diluting the emotional force of both.

Running quietly beneath all this is another recognisably biblical tension: law versus mercy.

Jesus shows instinctive compassion for those deemed impure… You know: lepers, the crucified, the outcast. He moves toward suffering rather than away from it. This places him at odds with the rigid purity concerns of his world, and increasingly at odds with Joseph’s fear-driven religiosity.

It’s a subtle but important thread. The film understands that Jesus’ ministry is not a rejection of holiness, but a redefinition of it, one rooted in proximity rather than separation.

As a horror film, The Carpenter’s Son is uneven. It lacks the raw terror to fully satisfy genre purists, and its tonal indecision blunts its sharpest edges.

As a theological provocation, it’s far more interesting.

This is a film about idolatry, not golden calves, but mental images of God we cling to because they reassure us. It’s about how easily faith becomes control, how quickly devotion curdles into resentment when God refuses to behave as expected.

And in its best moments, it reminds us that the most frightening thing isn’t demons, or Satan, or prophecy but the possibility that we might prefer an idol we can control to a God who refuses to be shaped by our hands.

Out of a potential 5, you have to go with a Darkmatters:

ööö1/2

(3.5 - It may not be a great horror film. But it is a God-haunted one.)

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Matt's Top Ten Films of 2025

2025-12-27T20:57:00.001+00:00

Here are my favourite films of the year...

Weapons (Zach Cregger)

Cregger follows Barbarian by going bigger, darker and more structurally unhinged, folding multiple disappearances, small-town rot and a creeping sense of moral contagion into something that plays like a cursed multi-viewpoint fairy tale. Weapons understands that the scariest thing isn’t the monster (altho she is pretty fearsome) but the community that quietly reorganises itself around trauma. Precision-made dread, bleakly funny in places, and proof that Cregger is now operating as a full-on American horror architect rather than a one-hit disruptor. Some of the crowd I saw this with at the cinema were standing and cheering at the climax, that's such a rush!

One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)

PTA goes muscular and mischievous here, shaping a post-idealism America haunted by its own protest movements and ideological aftershocks. Looser than Phantom Thread but more focused than Inherent Vice, this feels like Anderson riffing on history as a looping argument rather than a straight line. There’s sweat, humour, and a low hum of paranoia beneath the talk, a film that knows revolutions don’t end, they just change fonts. And the cinematography is some of the best ever!?

Sinners (Ryan Coogler)

Coogler’s first outright genre pivot lands as a blood-soaked Southern Gothic with teeth and intent. Vampirism here isn’t sexy immortality but inheritance (think sin passed down, monetised, ritualised). Anchored by Michael B. Jordan in dual roles, Sinners fuses horror with blues history, racial memory and the idea that America never really lets anything die. Lush, angry, and mythic in the best way, saw this in IMAX and it blew my mind!

Bring Her Back (Danny & Michael Philippou)

The Talk To Me duo double down on grief-horror, crafting something meaner, sadder and more intimate. This isn’t about jump scares so much as the unbearable desire to undo a single moment. The brothers show a growing confidence in letting scenes rot in silence, and when the violence comes it feels earned and oh boy, that scene with the melon knife is one that will never leave you... Bring Her Back is a film that understands mourning as a kind of possession, one you invite in yourself, not for the faint of heart.

The Ballad of Wallis Island (James Griffiths)

Gentle, funny and unexpectedly bruising, this feels like a folk song discovered on an old hard drive, and instead of sucking, they take you places you didn't expect. Built around loneliness, fading friendships and the strange ache of unrealised lives, this film sneaks up on you with warmth before quietly breaking your heart. There’s a distinctly British melancholy here, rain, memory, missed chances, handled with such lightness you barely notice how deep it cuts. Plus Carey Mulligan is still my fantasy woman :)

F1 (Joseph Kosinski)

Do you feel the need? The need for speed... Only on four wheels rather than in the air!? Kosinski does for Formula One what he did for fighter jets: strips away the gloss to reveal the terrifying ballet underneath. Shot with punishing immediacy and physicality, this is less sports movie and more controlled experiment in speed, risk and ego. Brad Pitt’s ageing racer isn’t chasing glory so much as relevance, and the film understands that velocity is addictive precisely because it’s unsustainable. Big, loud, and surprisingly reflective.

The Phoenician Scheme (Wes Anderson)

Anderson’s espionage fantasia plays like a diorama stuffed with double-crosses, deadpan assassins and emotional repression rendered in pastel. Beneath the symmetry and whimsy is a story about legacy, trust and the absurdity of inherited power. Benicio del Toro grounds the film with unexpected weariness, reminding us that Anderson’s brilliant dollhouse worlds increasingly function as mausoleums for broken men. But they are oh-so-much-fun!!

Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos)

Lanthimos remakes the Korean cult oddity Save the Green Planet! and leans fully into conspiracy as emotional illness. Wildly funny, deeply uncomfortable, and shot with clinical indifference, Bugonia asks whether believing the world is fake is any worse than accepting its cruelty as normal. Emma Stone continues her fearless collaboration with Lanthimos, operating at the edge of satire and collapse. One guy fainted in the screening of this I saw, hope he's ok (and has the chance to catch the ending as the answer to 'is she an alien' does get answered!!

Eddington (Ari Aster)

Aster’s COVID-era Western is his angriest film yet, a portrait of a town atomised by misinformation, masculinity and performative morality. Less horror in the traditional sense, more social exorcism, Eddington is deliberately abrasive, often hilarious, and deeply unsettling in how recognisable it feels. Joaquin Phoenix is a walking wound of authority and resentment, and Aster refuses the comfort of catharsis.

The Order (Justin Kurzel)

Kurzel returns to extremist psychology with grim focus, charting the rise of a white supremacist terror cell with procedural coldness and moral clarity. Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult turn the film into a duel of belief versus obsession, and Kurzel resists sensationalism at every turn. This is not a thriller designed to entertain but to warn — violence shown as banal, contagious and terrifyingly organised.

- - -

Full disclosure I haven't seen Marty Supreme or Sentimental Value, both of which I have a strong feeling might have made it into my top ten!?

CHECK OUT MY 2024 TOP TEN

CHECK OUT MY 2023 TOP TEN

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Pluribus review / guide - new scifi happiness

2025-11-07T12:07:00.003+00:00

Pluribus (Apple TV+)

Review / guide by Matt (@cleric20) Adcock

Just when you thought TV had got safe, Vince Gilligan is back and he’s brought the end of human authenticity with him. Pluribus, Apple TV’s new flagship sci-fi drama, opens not with a bang but with an unnervingly serene smile. Across Albuquerque, people are just a little too happy. It’s the kind of world where your neighbour waves at you for too long, and the local news signs off with a grin that won’t fade.

Enter Carol Sturka (Rhea ‘Better Call Saul’ Seehorn), a best-selling romance novelist who is, deliciously, “the most miserable person on Earth.” While everyone else is busy basking in newfound joy, Carol’s having none of it. She’s hollow, cynical, sharp — and crucially, immune to the mysterious wave of euphoric contagion sweeping humanity.

The episode’s opening ten minutes are a minor masterclass in tone. A sun-bleached diner, a radio DJ announcing that happiness levels have reached “record highs,” and a slow pan to a woman methodically licking a donut before putting it back in the box. It’s absurd, funny, grotesque and perfectly Gilligan.

The title isn’t subtle. Pluribus (Latin for “many,” as in E Pluribus Unum) evokes the collective, the idea that unity through conformity might just crush individuality. Episode 1 plays with this tension beautifully.

The premise: a new condition, part mental ‘glue’, part spiritual awakening, is spreading. It makes people radiantly optimistic and relentlessly cooperative. Crime vanishes. Depression disappears. Governments praise it as the dawn of a new humanity. And yet Carol sees only the rot beneath the smile.

Gilligan shoots her loneliness in harsh daylight, wide shots of her trudging through crowds of blissful citizens, the only frown for miles. She looks like a glitch in a utopian simulation.

Rhea Seehorn carries the episode with controlled weariness. Her Carol is brittle, intelligent, and visibly allergic to the enforced good vibes. There’s a moment where her publicist (a perfectly oily supporting turn from Carlos Manuel Vesga) tells her, “You could sell more books if you just smiled in photos.” Carol’s dry retort: “Maybe you could read more if you stopped smiling all the time” - lands like a prayer for everyone still clinging to emotional honesty.

“Happiness is the new herd immunity.”

Science fiction has long explored emotion as contagion, think The Stepford Wives, Smile, or Black Mirror’s Nosedive. But Pluribus takes that metaphor and runs it through Gilligan’s moral lens. Happiness here is institutionalised. Clinics hand out “optimism boosters.” Street billboards flash with slogans like “It’s your choice - be happy!”

The result feels like a spiritual sequel to Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul but instead of meth or moral decay, the drug is contentment itself. As one background voice on a news broadcast says:

“Happiness is the new herd immunity.”

For those of us who watch with an eye for deeper meaning, Pluribus might be Gilligan’s most explicitly theological work yet. The idea of a world that worships false joy echoes ancient warnings against idols … the golden calves of comfort and self-satisfaction.

Carol’s immunity feels almost prophetic. She’s the lone dissenting spirit in a culture that has mistaken chemical calm for salvation. There’s an echo of Jeremiah here, lamenting while everyone else throws festivals.

It’s rich ground for reflection which is exactly the kind of moral discomfort Gilligan excels at.

Visually, the show is stunning. Albuquerque’s deserts are rendered in eerie pastel hues, giving it a slightly ‘off’ vibe, like the world’s been lightly Photoshopped. Director Michelle MacLaren (also Breaking Bad veteran) frames scenes with surgical precision, keeping Carol just slightly off-centre, always an outsider.

Composer Dave Porter returns too, with a score that oscillates between lullaby and dread. It’s a soundscape of enforced calm elevator music that wants you to relax but leaves you itching instead.

Out of a potential 5, you have to go with a Darkmatters:

ööööö

(5 - Pluribus is an elegant, slow-burning provocation...equal parts Black Mirror, Better Call Saul, and Brave New World. It’s not action-packed, but it hums with intelligence. Gilligan is clearly working at full creative power again, and Seehorn is mesmerising.)

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Tom's Crossing (Mark Z. Danielewski) REVIEW

2025-10-27T19:01:00.004+00:00

TOM’S CROSSING

By Mark Z. Danielewski

Review by Matt Adcock (@Cleric20)

Twenty-five years after House of Leaves delivered a nuclear strike on readers’ brains, Mark Z. Danielewski rides back into view with Tom’s Crossing and death rides with him.

Set in Utah, 1982, this 1,232-page beast follows two teenage outcasts, namely Kalin March and Tom Gatestone, whose friendship ignites a small-town legend. When Tom dies young, Kalin swears to save the two horses his friend loved most from being slaughtered by local meat baron Orwin ‘Old’ Porch.

What starts as a rescue mission becomes something far bigger. This is the tale of a manhunt, a myth, a reckoning where the living and the dead both have unfinished business.

You know when a book grabs you from the first page and grips you, takes over your waking thoughts and makes you count down the minutes until you dive back in? Well that's what Tom's Crossing did to me!!

Tom’s Crossing trades basements for mountains, ink for dust, and typeface trickery for something rawer and more universal. Sentences roll like thunder, break into whispers, double back on themselves.

There’s a new kind of terror, too; it’s not the creeping dread of House of Leaves, but the fear invoked by the brutality of human rage and consequence. Old Porch, furious and armed, becomes an avatar of everything toxic in power and patriarchy. He’s a villain as Biblical as he is believable, a man so desperate to maintain control he will do unthinkable things and blame the kids who fled with his horses.

By the time Kalin and Tom’s sister Landry, reach the high pass of Pillars Meadow, the novel has transcended the western and turned mythic. You could say it’s part Iliad, part Blood Meridian, part ghost-lit American scripture.

For fans of House of Leaves, (as we are at Darkmatters) Tom’s Crossing is a revelation. Reality and myth burn through the lens of how memory ‘bends’ truth, leaving stories of the dead.

It’s sprawling, gorgeous, probably longer than it needs to be, but isn’t that part of the point? Every legend worth the name has room for exaggeration.

Tom’s Crossing is a singular, howling achievement, what feels like a million pages scrawled by a poet of the uncanny. It’s violent, lyrical, and unafraid of its own bigness. This is Danielewski burning a new trail, through blood, bone, and the language of the American myth.

By the end, I felt haunted, exhilarated, and strangely grateful that House of Leaves wasn’t a fluke.

An epic of grief, friendship, and redemption that dares to find ghosts not in walls, but in wide open sky.

Out of a potential 5, you have to go with a Darkmatters:

ööööö

(5 - A blood-soaked miracle of storytelling… this is the Western reimagined as an elegy for both the living and the dead.)

>>> Imagine a world where the earth is becoming hell? One man with powers and his robot sidekick might be our only hope...

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Matt lives The Life of a Showgirl (review)

2025-10-04T22:37:00.004+01:00

Taylor Swift:

The Life of a Showgirl

By Matt (@Cleric20) Adcock

It starts with static.

Not silence, static, like the sound of old Hollywood trying to reboot itself on a dying hard drive.

Then comes the hum.

A synth shiver, a breath that feels half-human, half-machine. And then: Taylor.

Not the wide-eyed ingénue. Not the cardigan poet.

This time, she strides onto the virtual stage as something other.

A cyber goddess in sequins, transmitting heartbreak across the grid.

This album feels like watching fame eat itself in slow motion, neon fangs and digital mascara, but Taylor doesn’t flinch. She conducts the whole shimmering disaster with a flick of her hand. The Life of a Showgirl is a concept album disguised as a pop record, a fever-dream manifesto about identity, illusion, and the cost of being adored.

It’s an album that wants you to dance but also to look at what’s twitching under the glitter.

There’s a line (in “Wi$hli$t”) that caught me sideways:

“We tell the world to leave us the fuck alone, and they do.”

That’s the thesis right there.

Swift has always been meta, but here she’s radioactive. She’s uploading memories into melody, weaponising charm, rewriting the firmware of femininity under pressure.

The Songs That Glitch Beautifully

“Wi$hli$t” is the purest heartbreak code, a twilight lament whispered into the circuitry of longing and playfully taking down those vibing life’s superficial desires…

“Elizabeth Taylor” isn’t just a song, it’s a séance. She channels the old-world glamour ghost like it’s living inside her bloodstream fame as both mirror and curse. When the beat drops, you can almost hear diamonds cracking.

And “Honey” … oh God. It’s narcotic, dangerous, sticky with desire and self-awareness. It could be a love song or a weapon. Maybe both. The sweetness turns venomous, it’s a reflection that’s been selling her to the world.

Taylor’s production team have made this thing sound like a memory you shouldn’t have access to: a sleek pop one moment, distorted VHS playback the next. It’s Blade Runner Barbie filtered through Black Mirror, scored by the ghosts of disco balls past.

There’s no filler, just confessions in chrome, sighs encoded in reverb. Even when she falters, it feels intentional, like she’s daring the façade to crack.

The Life of a Showgirl will mesmerize you and burn a Taylor-shaped silhouette onto your neural interface and leave you wondering if any of it was real.

By the time the final track fades, you half expect her to wink and dissolve into pixels.

Because that’s the trick, isn’t it?

The real Taylor Swift doesn’t exist anymore.

She’s still touring in 2242 - check my Complete Darkness comic 😀

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